Philharmonie or, what is 'beautiful'?

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Even since my wonderful night out at the young musicians’ festival at the Konzerthaus, far too many weeks ago, I have been trying to find another Berlin concert at which I might get myself a comparable ‘fix’ of the kind of music I am discovering all too late in life. It hasn’t been easy. I have trudged for weeks through the local concert listings, looking for interesting programming – and for me that means nothing too ancient and ‘classical’ but no three vacuum-cleaners and a krumhorn either – and finally I lighted on last night’s concert at the Philharmonie. A building which I wanted to go and discover.  Debussy, Ravel, Mahler and R Strauss. Go for it. Actually, getting the tickets was a marathon task, for on-line booking is fraught with German-language dangers and fees, and using a foreign credit card in Germany a perfect nightmare. But – after riding the U-Bahn into town and the office of the Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester -- I got there.

So, last night, after a small supper at Sissi, Paul – my music master by appointment -- and I headed through the falling shades of night for the Potsdamer-Platz and the Philharmonie. I had been told that this concert-hall was something remarkable, so I wasn’t unprepared to be knocked sideways. For remarkable it is. The clean, modern, foyer space is vast, littered with staircases, and – in spite of attendants every ten metres -- you need a map (or good German) to find your way to your seat in the auditorium. But once there! This is probably the most stunning modern concert hall I have visited. Layers upon layers of interlocked seating levels… and we were wonderfully seated both for seeing and for hearing (although Paul says the Philharmonie is aurally great from everywhere). I was, however, distinctly surprised to see the hall only two-thirds filled. Maybe this was because the concert was ‘an occasion’ -- the live-broadcast launch of a new German radio station, Deutschlandradio Kultur – which meant that we had a sizeable chunk of fuzzily-amplified talking from the radio announcer between numbers.



The billed performers for the evening – all young, which could not be said for some of the orchestra! --were Japanese-American conductor Eugene Tzigane, Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan and American mezzo Sasha Cooke. I knew nothing of any of them (nor, I suspect, did anyone else) but was not unprepared for slightly ‘young’ performances. I was unprepared for one stunning performance.

We started gently with ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’. The sound was splendid. The whole orchestra seemed to be singing with one voice. And, whereas in Petrouchka I had missed the visuals and drama of the ballet: here I felt exactly the opposite. I like this piece better without the dancing. We spent a very comfortable faunish afternoon and it served nicely to introduce me to the hall and the orchestra. Gently. Very gently.

The Ravel Piano concerto in G major was new to me, and I wasn’t at all sure, in its opening movement, that it suited me. After the homogeneity of the Debussy, we were suddenly presented with what sounded like an orchestra chopped up into bits, with each bit doing its own thing. The most notable ‘perversion’ was the violently braying introduction of the then (1932) fashionable sounds of America, which seemed to me to be ‘stuck on’ to the work, rather than an integrated part of it. I was happier when we moved to the slow movement, but here I wasn’t sure that the adept but perhaps slightly introverted soloist was quite getting the ‘vocal line’ out of his instrument that he might have. And then, it all came together -- pianist and composer, orchestra and the sometimes rather exaggerated conductor -- in a splendidly vivacious final movement, which brought the first half of the concert to a wholly effective climax.
Well, it would have, if the pianist hadn’t succumbed to the Berlin one-bow-too-many-syndrome, which he topped by coming back and giving an audience which was half on its way to the bar and the loo, ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring’. Climax dissipated, and me left thinking of school competitions.

Part two of the concert proper began with the Rückert Lieder. Five songs in the established Mahlerian vein for orchestra and mezzo-soprano. Here again, I had only a general idea of what to expect, and here my expectations were excelled. The first three songs are delightful, but they do not make you sit up. Miss Cooke sang very, very pleasantly, the orchestra played too often too loudly (the lady is a mezzo, not a contralto, so her low notes, in particular, need to be liberated from exuberant accompaniment, especially brazen), and then ... with ‘Um Mitternacht’ the vocalist went and soared. Oh, did she soar. It is a beautiful voice, clear and even, rich and straight, expressive, sympathetic .. a classic mezzo-soprano that is surely ideally suited in songs such as these. And she performs with no false dramatics, no useless gesture, no grimaces: just a simple, lovely sincerity. When she followed up song number four with the soft, dying final piece of the set ... well, suddenly, the evening had turned into something else. I had written that I was coming to a ‘beautiful concert in beautiful company’. Here was beauty.
As the song’s last notes died away, I grinned gap-mouthed at Paul, he slapped me on the back, and we were up on our feet applauding and yelling. Wonderful stuff, wonderful singing …



How to follow that? Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung was, as a child, one of my and my father’s favourite records, so I was sure I would be safe. I remember how impressive and atmospheric I used to find it. Well ... tonight, I’m afraid my main impression was rather: ‘isn’t it noisy’. And ‘the string-players must have tennis elbow after that’. I didn’t ‘not like it’ – how could one? But I was just a little disappointed that it didn’t live up to my fond memories. And I knew I was being disappointed, because at one stage I found myself transfixed by the antics of the bouncing conductor as he turned – at comically top speed – the pages of his score. My concentration regained, I followed the piece to its end with mitigated feelings. I felt just a little let down.
As we left the hall, I said to Paul, ‘I liked the last two songs and the third movement of the Ravel best. What about you?’. His verdict was identical. So the professional and trained musician (him) and the instinctive, ex-professional and largely untrained me were in accord. Which, I’d say, probably means we were pretty right. Wouldn’t you?

We sat in the Potsdamer-Platz, when the music was done, with a beer, a cigarette and a little analysis of this and that, and watched a bass fiddle and a violin go by, greeted Paul’s young friends of the Berlin music world – Heidi the bassoon, Sacha the clarinet, a piano, an oboe – and managed to keep ourselves from rushing across the pavement like schoolboy film-fans when Miss Cooke passed by …
And then it was time for the U-Bahn ..
Oh dear, in ten days I will be out of here. Flying towards the southern hemisphere. And I feel I’ve only tipped a toe into what musical Berlin has to offer. But since I’m already booked to return for the spring, I guess the next stage of musical education can wait till then.

So, I got my beautiful concert. In beautiful company. For there is nothing like listening to music – especially unfamiliar music -- in congenial and knowledgeable circumstances to make it both comprehensible and memorable. So thank you, Paul. And thank you, Miss Sasha Cooke.

"I am a man who knows what he wants ..."

. It’s taken me a whole ten days to brave entering another German theatre, after having witnessed the despicable murder of Die Blume von Hawaii at the Halle theatre, but last night I did – and, daringly, for another evening of pre-war Operette music. The venue was the Kleines Theater, a house in the suburb of Friedenau which thoroughly lives up to its name. It is a delicious and characterful 100-seater, with mini-stage, mini-box office, mini-foyer, mini-bar (and mini-toilets): the whole so miniature that you wonder who ever had the idea of squeezing a theatre into such a space. The theatre’s ambitions, however, are in no way miniature. This month, in repertoire, they are playing versions of The Invitation and Misery, a show about Johnny Cash, an evening of Schlager, a piece about the inescapable (these days) Frida Kahlo, and Warum soll eine Frau kein Verhältnis Haben?, an entertainment constructed around the songs of pre-war Operette star, Fritzi Massary.

  It was this last, of course, that I had come – just a little nervously -- to see. Was I going to have to ‘make allowances’? Well, none were needed… at the Kleines Theater I was to see sane and witty staging and direction and delightful choreography, witness some of the most enjoyable performances I’ve seen on the German stage, and listen to some of Germany’s most beautiful 20th century music sung, if not by Wunderlich, Gedda, Ahlers, Schwarzkopf or Massary, by artists who gave their all in respectful and wholly enjoyable versions of the works of Fall, Straus and their fellow greats. The entertainment is, thankfully, not the musical stage’s 3000th biomusical. In fact, although the actors are listed as playing, and are more or less characterised as, Fritzi Massary, Max Pallenburg, Hans Albers et al, it does not pretend to be a play at all. Author/director James Edward Lyons has simply taken three dozen of the best songs of the Massary era, and linked them together with a light-hearted and ficticious skeleton of amorous fencing, in a piece which has much of the feeling of the best of 1930s German revue to it. Along with those perfectly marvellous songs. As a barely German speaker, I might have preferred an ounce less talk and several ounces more of the songs – but the sold-out house (read my lips, Regietheater directors: ‘sold out’) chortled away merrily, and by part two I was well in the swing. Actually, I’d been swinging in my own way since the first musical moment – when a show opens with that wonderful number, ‘Anna was ist mit mir? (Der liebe Augustin) how not? And when the first act climaxes in the musical treat of the evening, with the entire cast joining in totally adorable harmony in the ‘Lied vom Schlafcoupé’ (Die geschiedene Frau) and the Automobile song from The Dollar Princess, how not go out in the interval in search of champagne?

  The ‘entire cast’ consists of five acting-singing (unamplified)-dancing players and a hard-worked, pound-away, pianist, with trombone moment. A big cast. You would have trouble shoe-horning one more artist on to this stage and, indeed, from time to time one or two of them had to pop off into the auditorium for a bit.

  The Fritzi of the night was the well-known actress Agnes Hilpert, elegant in teal (though handicapped by an ugly wig) and with the necessary acting, singing and dancing skills all at her fingertips. Her performance of the famous ‘Eine Frau, die weiss, was sie will’ ('I am a woman who knows what she wants') was the solo hit of the first half, but she moved truly into top gear in the much livelier and more theatrical second part, with a fun version of ‘Im Liebesfalle’ and as the central character of a wild, Marx-Brothersish burlesque of Straus’s Die Perlen der Cleopatra. Watching her manipulate a six-kilometre yellow train through the antics of her fellow players was one of the funniest moments of the night.

  But there were plenty more of them, those funny moments. The three men of the team are all three consummate comedy players. Boris Freytag (Pallenberg) is a grotesque comedian of singular talents. Hollywood (or UFA) 1930 would surely have loved him. And if his singing voice is, shall we say, minimal, he puts over a humorous song with great effect and skill. Charles Lemming, as Albers, got his big moment in the burlesque, and grabbed it with both hands, but my particular favourite was the plumpishly bespectacled ‘ageing soubret’, Franz Frickel. His opening song-and-dance routine with the soubrette (Nini Stadlmann) was a total joy – I spent the whole evening wanting to see him dance again and again – his acting and timing were perfect throughout, his voice is light, sweet and true, and he does that appealing 'frightened rabbit' look better even than Gene Wilder. And as for his striptease…!

  Miss Stadlmann, in a role which required her to be everything in turn, managed to be almost everything. If she lacked the accurate soprano heights, and the breadth to sing a piece such as ‘Jede frau hat irgendeine Sehnsucht’ ('Every woman thinks she wants to wander'), she more than made up for it the moment she began to dance, which is assuredly what she does best. Actually, perhaps not, for I gather that, though uncredited, she was responsible for the show’s choreography. And that, particularly her two pas de deux with Frickel, was another of the highlights of the entertainment. When -- too soon! -- the evening sang and danced to its end to the tune of Krasznay-Krausz’s 1927 ‘Nebenbei’ (Eine Frau mit Format), I was feeling gloriously at peace with the world. And with the German theatre. But it does make me think. If a theatre such as this with, I imagine, very restricted finances, can invent and mount an entertainment (and, indeed, a repertoire) of this standard, with performers and performances of this standard … what is going on in those large and heavily-subsidised theatres that turn out pitiful, talentless rubbish such as I saw at Halle. Never mind. I know where I’ll be going for my entertainment when I’m in Berlin again. And, who knows, I may catch up with Warum soll eine Frau kein Verhältnis haben? somewhere else in the country or the world. For it looks, to me, like a piece that will not live and die in one production. But, whoever does it next … you may have a job to do it as well as it is currently being done in Berlin’s Südwestkorso. 

Photos by Jörn Hartmann

A Wedding on the Spree, or marriage à la men

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I haven’t been to more than three or four weddings in my life. And all few of them of the male-female variety. So it was quite sailing in unknown waters for me to spend yesterday celebrating, at Berlin’s Rote Rathaus (Red Town Hall) and later at a Youth Club in Prenzlauerberg, the marriage between my young friend, Hannes, and his splendid ‘boyfriend from Bosnia’, Mirza.
And what a day it was! I am told hysteria sets in the lead-up to weddings, and there were indeed one or two tight throats on view at times, but the young folk had the luck to have our Ollie as their ‘fixer’ and everything, from start to finish, went on lavishly-lubricated wheels.

The hall of the Rathaus is a lovely place for a ceremony. Imposing, classical, but not too much so, and splendidly echo-ey in accoustics. Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand much of the registrar’s apparently appreciable monologue, but the body language spoke better German than I, and, of course, once the music started…
The music was provided by my pal, Paul (‘Montmorensy’), on a keyboard hastily borrowed from Tim Fischer, and his song for the occasion was that aria of arch-devotion, ‘If I Were a Cloud’ (words and music: Montmorensy). Being decidedly of the devoted kind myself, I felt a little, self-indulgent prickle begin on the inside of my left eyelid as he reached the final ‘oh’…



Then the bridegroom kissed the bridegroom, the registers were signed, joy reigned everywhere … and not too many of us knew that Mirza had somehow lost his passport the previous day and that the newly-weds were going to have to spend the first hours of their married life at the Bosnian Embassy and the police-station…



We filled those first hours between the ceremony and the evening celebration with champagne on the edge of the Spree, and a stroll down the river’s banks to an Italian restaurant, after which Thomas H took Paul and I for a guided tour of his delicious little underground theatre, the ‘Quatch’: a former East German nude revue house now devoted with vast success to comedy programmes. It has everything of that 19th-century music-hall feel that I love to it … soon I must return and, German language or not, watch a show going on amid its red-and-gold intimacy.

By 7pm, Ollie had completed the transformation of the scruffy clubroom into a glittering cabaret, Hannes’s family had magicked up mountains of food, an Iranian taxi-driver had unbelieveably produced the missing passport, and – as, Julia poured gallon after gallon of champagne -- on came the Entertainment.
We started with a set of five of the best from Montmorensy, followed by an emotional rendering of the young couple’s favourite song from the omni-talented Ollie. And then, finally, we all sang. As rows of sparklers waved in the traditional fashion, we joined together in what must have been one of the rousing-est and ringing-est renditions of ‘Somewhere’ in a long time. Well, the room did contain some of Berlin’s best singing performers. And yours truly – who hasn’t operaticked in a long time – unshyly bawled out his bit along with them.

More champagne, more food – Paul even braved with gusto the top tier of the deeply-iced strawberry wedding cake! – and all sorts of new folk to meet – Marion the politician, Guido who I had enjoyed so much in Cabaret, Anthony from America, Dirk from South Africa … what a cosmopolitan lot we were and, thank goodness, everyone, it seemed, speaking English! Useful. For Mirza, like me, doesn’t (yet) speak German…

I’m sure the party went merrily on until the wee hours, but we slipped quietly away well before the witching moment. It had been a long day … but such a lovely one. The herald, I hope, to a marvellous married life for two really lovely young men.

Dammit, it’s days like today I get the feeling I want to be married, too …!

Birthday with Nefertiti

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Not my birthday. I’m not ready for another of those, just yet. My friend Ollie’s. And we celebrated with a nice wander around the heart of Berlin and a visit to the remarkable Neues Museum.
The Neues Museum is situated on the ‘Museum Island’, amongst some of the grandest and greatest old public buildings of the city, but it is, itself, a re-born building, recreated from a badly war-damaged original – over a period of many years – under the management of the architect David Chipperfield.



It is not a ‘kitsch’ recreation of the original: it is a combination of the remnants of the C19th building with modern elements .. something that we have seen, time and again, can be either an great and imaginative success or an uncomfortable neither-one-thing-or-the-other flop.




This one – with its wonderful, uncluttered, looming rooms and crypts and its dizzily monolithic staircase -- is a great and imaginative success, one of the most enjoyable old-new exhibition buildings I have ever seen. And the collection – largely of Egyptian relics – that it has been built to house, make up a really enjoyable museum-visit.
The Big Star Item of the collection is the famous bust of Nefertiti, perfectly housed and lit, in a dark room (photographs not allowed) in a kind of space canister. However, I was just a tad disappointed in Nefertiti. She was just too perfect, too painted, her restored (?) nose impossibly pert, her make-up looking as if it could have been done yesterday. I grew up with a repro Nefertiti in the museum of Wellington, NZ. She was a little tatty, and somehow more convincing.



But there was plenty less famous material here to see and enjoy, the Egyptian items mixed with ancient pieces from other parts of the world – splendid! history is ‘of the world’ after all, not of just one area – and if we skipped through the cases of bronze-age adzes (sorry, one adze to me is just like another), we found plenty to admire as we struggled to refresh our knowledge of such subjects as the Egyptian pantheon and ancient funerary rites. Splendid statuary and sarcophagi, beautiful mummies and grave objects, and amongst all the major pieces, some marvellous little gods and animals and even a skeletal elk!



The Neues Museum is, for me, with or without Nefertiti, a total success. Both the building and the collection. And we spent a splendid 90 minutes doing the rounds before moving back into the modern world, and on to a sushi supper at Prenzlauerberg…
A decidedly nice way to spend a birthday. Even someone else’s.

Postscript: on our way, Ollie introduced me to his favourite Denkmal (‘monument’). It is now one of mine, too. The subject commemorated is the devastating 1933 Nazi episode of ‘the burning of the books’, and the monument is below ground. You look, at your feet, through a glass panel set in the cobbles of the Bebelplatz and you see … nothing. Rows of achingly empty white bookshelves. It may sound simple, but its effect is chilling.

Whoops! She nearly did it again!

6 September, and out again on the racetracks of Australia goes little Livia, for her first race as a just-turned-three-year-old! And, goodness me, it was almost a repeat performance..

Once again, she was dropped out at the start and, with a lap to go, she was -- as ever -- running along cold, motherless last of the ten runners. Down the back, she got a nice run up the inside, but coming round the last bend she was still a good half-dozen lengths off the leader. Into the straight (and, my goodness, she does corner now better than she used to!) and now she turned on that same staunch finishing run that had got her gold at Geelong. She doesn't go 'whoosh!', with that violent change of gear that some horses have, she just turns up the wick and puts her little shoulders in to it...

Down the home straight, the six-length gap began to melt, and it really did look as if she might power past the leaders, just as she had last time out. But the six lengths were three-parts-of-a-length too much, and at the line she was third, beaten a mere metre and a half, and just half-a-neck off the second horse.

Little Livia may not be a star, but she is a wonderfully honest wee filly who, I suspect, is going to run in the money for us on a good few more occasions..

http://www.harness.org.au/video/vic/MHC06091005.wmv

The Happy Half of Halle

If Halle has turned out to be my own particular theatrical disaster area, my trip there was – prior to curtain time -- anything but a disaster.
I seem to remember that last year I found the city rather downhearted and drab. Well, either they have done wonders with it in the meanwhile, or I just didn’t look at the right bits. This time it was lively, bright, attractive and fun..
In the company of three generations of the Clarke family, I wandered the bustling streets, snapped the attractive buildings, in particular the celebrated church, and while the Clarkes did the rounds of the art gallery at the Moritzburg (which I did last year), I sat in the palace courtyard and the sun with a glass of the local white wine and relaxed happily… right opposite a stage erected for performances of Verdi’s Otello!
A huge (for me) dinner of salt pork and sauerkraut at a local hostelry … and then off to the beautiful theatre and ..
Well, you can’t win ‘em all!

Murdering a Magnificent Musical

Last season, I made a trip to the town of Halle, to view and review a new musical entitled Poe. It turned out to be one of the few dozen most unpleasant theatrical experiences of my life. But, yesterday, I went there again. 

Masochistic? I thought not. For this time the theatre was producing one of my very favourite central European musical plays, the classic Operette Die Blume von Hawaii. Last time I saw it, was in semi-professional summer-theatre at Baden bei Wien more than twenty years ago, and the chance of seeing it again, and hearing its wonderful lavish and lilting Pal Abraham music, in a proper theatre was not to be missed. Result? 

Disaster. Disgust. Disillusion. One of the very worst productions of any musical that I have seen in fifty years of theatregoing, anywhere in the world. What I saw on the stage at Halle was not Abraham and Földes's brilliant and beautiful Die Blume von Hawaii. It wasn’t even a burlesque of the piece: burlesque is, after all, a legitimate art form. This wasn’t any kind of art. This was amateurism and incompetence run rife: a performance that you would shudder at had you seen it in a village hall in Paekakariki, New Zealand. 

Three people have to take the bulk of the blame. The producer, the ‘dramaturg’, and the director. The producer. Why did he want to do this piece? He evidently despises the Operette genre. Thinks himself above it. So instead of putting on the piece as it was written, he had it deconstructed, camped-up, sneered at, grossly rewritten … 

Rewritten. The libretto of Die Blume von Hawaii is an admirable 1931 mixture of the romantic and the stylishly light comic, illustrated by a marvellous mixture of classic European music and the American dance rhythms then being melded into the Austro-Hungarian tradition. ‘Romantic’, however, was far too challenging for this fellow. Way outside his abilities. The whole text was reduced to a low – and I can’t avoid repeating the word – campy load of rubbish, ‘compered’ by a largely invented character in the most juvenile fashion. As for ‘comic’ .. the merry, lighthearted moments of the show, in dialogue and song and dance, were simply reduced to gross buffoonery. ‘Stylishly’? He clearly doesn’t know what the word means. Directed? You have to laugh. 

Where does the German provincial theatre get its stage directors from? First Masaniello at Dessau, now this. And this was far, far worse. I didn’t invent the phrase ‘camp covers incompetence’, but I shall repeat it here. Incompetence. Paekakariki could definitely find a dozen more capable directors. This was amateur time, in the worst sense of the word. There was not a moving moment, a moment of genuine humour, an idea, a breath of scenic or picturesque enjoyment … just boring, unimaginative, old-fashioned, limp-wristed, concert-party clowning. And camp. 

I think that if I had to give a prize for the worst direction of any piece, from during my fifty years of musicals-going, this one just might be the winner. The players, with a producer, a dramaturg and a director with no confidence in their material, had little chance. Those who had to sing didn’t even get an opportunity to do that, for the beautiful music, as inadequately played and reorganised, could not be sung. The most magnificent musical numbers were wrecked by more guying, more stupidity, more camp. More amdram antics. But, in any case, not one performer showed up with anything like the ability needed to play and sing this show. The Lilo Taro (tenor?) might just do for the D’Oyly Carte chorus, the Princess Laya, who did struggle to be allowed to sing, gave a feebly grotesque drunk scene which revealed the extent of her inabilities, and the Captain Stone – who staunchly did push some melody out of his small light baritone – was one of the worst ‘coarse acting’ criminals. The actor who played the invented ‘compere’ is apparently a well-known personality. Well, he won’t want to be ‘known’ for this. Clad in cruise-ship gold lame, he creaked omnipresently through the show like an end-of-the-pier comic doing a Frankie Howerd impersonation. I had to look at my shoes with embarrassment. I could go on in the same vein, but to what good?

It is very, very rare for me to come out of a theatre unable to find one good word for anything in the production and performance of a show. At Halle, I did. I did not get a programme, so I did not know until we were driving home to Berlin that the three criminals of the night – the three murderers of this great classic show – were, in fact, one and the same person. That figures. Three civic employees as totally untalented would be hard to find. I don’t need or wish to know the gentleman’s name, but in my humble opinion he should get out of the theatre. Or will he go on to direct Mother Courage next, in the same style? Lord forbid he should be allowed to touch another musical piece. 

I am exhausted by the strength of my disgust and disappointment. And, yes, I imagine this is the most disgusted and disappointed review I have ever written in my life. And it leads me to two rather important thoughts. 

Firstly: the Halle theatre is state supported. This vain, amateurish stuff is being put on with tax-payers’ money. Somebody in the subsidy department should be looking long and hard at how their money is being spent, or Halle and its theatre, and those who support it, will become a bad joke. 

Secondly: Die Blume von Hawaii (which must surely still be under copyright) is, I believe, represented by the respected music firm of Josef Weinberger. Why is this firm permitting this Operette (and others?) to be textually and musically destroyed in such a way. Do not their heirs of Földes and Abraham, and their show, deserve to be better protected? 

I need a very hasty ‘fix’ of good, professionally produced and played German musical theatre to wipe this nightmare out of my mind. I shall hasten to Berlin’s Kleines Theater next week in quest of it. I do not want to leave Germany believing that what I saw last night represents the nation’s abilities in musical theatre. 

Postscript: comment on this article from a well-known British composer: 'If only German had the equivalent of the English 'wanker', Regietheater might have died long ago...' Oh, that it were so.

Where to, 'Revue'?

Eleven o’clock on an autumnal Berlin night, and I’ve thrown off my shoes and am curled up with a pile of smoked salmon, an ice-cold bottle of Köstritzer schwarzbier and an ice-cream Mars bar, while I muse on the evening I have just spent.
I have been to a sort of a premiere. The premiere of the show is actually tomorrow, but the press (intelligent idea!) were given their own avant-premiere tonight, and that meant Kevin and I. And the show…? It is called Yma (I’m not sure why), and it is the annual production at the Friedrichstadtpalast, advertisedly the largest revue theatre in Europe. Which I guess means it is a ‘revue’.

The word ‘revue’ has undergone a sea-change, evidently, from tonight’s showing, since the great days of Parisian and Berlin ‘revue’ of a century ago. In 1850, ‘revue’ satirically reviewed the years events, in 1900, ‘revue’ was the wittiest, cleverest, freshest and newest thing in town, bubbling over with freshly-minted or imported songs and sketches. Now, it could be best described as a ‘show’. The only trace of the ‘revue’ of olden times that I could discern tonight was the use of a commère, a meneuse de revue, to more or less (and rather less than more) link together the numbers of the night. For that is what Yma is: a succession of mostly sung, mostly choreographed numbers, relieved by a handful of specialities, and staged with ‘a hundred performers’ on the ‘biggest revue stage in Europe’.



Fair enough. So is bigger better? Well, my only experience of this kind of show goes back more than 20 years, to when I did the rounds of the Parisian shows – the Lido, the Moulin Rouge et al – and visited the Radio City Music Hall, New York, in the course of duty. I have never been to Las Vegas, but the man who introduced the show (in German) tonight -- theatre Intendant Berndt Schmidt, Kevin tells me -- clearly has. He must have said ‘Las Vegas’ thirty times in his introduction. I think he was courting comparison. I am told that he was snooty about the Moulin Rouge, too, although I missed that bit.
I liked the Moulin Rouge. I liked it a lot better than Yma. Even if it wasn’t bigger. It had heart, and style, and character. And the funny old building had a warmth.
The Friedrichstadtpalast is an ex-East German 1984 monolith. I don’t mind it, but you couldn’t accuse it of warmth. And the show? Well, if you have the ‘biggest revue stage in Europe’ you really need to fill it. Fill it with spectacle and colour and movement … design treats and design tricks .. girls and costumes, boys and scenery, routines and acts …
About the only place Yma fulfilled the needs on that list was with the girls and the boys. The chorus dancers and acrobats, who worked their beautiful young bodies with endless energy and flair … just like the young folk I saw the other night on the tiny stage of the Chamaleon. But you can work till you are blue and still make limited effect, if you have little or nothing to work on or with.



The first part of the show did hold a few goodies to keep things alive. There was a comical routine where the boys stripped off behind frosted (why, in 2010?) shower cubicles (all show fotos by Stefan Gustavus xix), and there was a first rate trampoline-acrobatic routine in a kinky modernist setting by a group called U-Show Team. The swimming-pool stage was put into regulation use, and anything that could fly flew. But elsewhere ... the commere was over-studied, uncharismatic and looked like a man in drag. I found out why: she was a man in drag. Why? Apparently because this is, according to Herr Schmidt, 'the gayest hetero show in town'. Hmm. I didn't notice. And talk about covering your front, back and all sides!



The male vocalist had been cast for charm not voice, and of the two overaged (?) female vocalists one (Jürgens) yowled painfully and the other (Krabbe) had merely moments of Petula-Clarkeish acceptability. Not nice, in any sense. No, you just had to focus on those splendid young chorus people and virevolteurs, their fine dancing and their occasionally fun routines …



Alas, by part two, director and choreographer had (give or take an Aenea act for a girl and two boys) run out of any ideas they may have had … the designer had never had many from the start … and the ‘half’ was only saved from disaster by the hit routine of the night: a simply dazzling aerial acrobatic performance by a Ukrainian pair calling themselves, embarrassingly, ‘The Flight of Passion’. I see from the programme that they won a Golden Clown at my dear old Monaco Festival de Cirque. They deserve it. They were amazing, and the audience let them know it. Their routine won thrice the applause of anything else during the entire evening.
So, if the music of the night was just reheated old tunes (the finale was, for heaven’s sake the 1968 Canfora/Amurri 'La vita' aka Shirley Bassey's ‘This is my Life’!), pounded out down a vast sound system by insufficient voices, if the dance routines too often lacked imagination and originality and got by only through the tireless efforts of the delightful dancers, if the solo performers were somewhere below cruise ship level and too much of the design colourless, pointless and dreary … I don’t care. I would have walked across Berlin, and squirmed through a full hour of Frln Jürgens’s yowling, just to see Dimitri and Olesya do their magnificent routine.

Obviously, ‘revue’, style 2010, is not for me. I was definitely more at home at the Chamaleon. So, who, I wonder, is it for? The ‘welcome’ at the show’s opening came in a number of languages, including Japanese. I suspect this is pure and simple coach party entertainment. But, then again, twenty years ago, I don’t suppose there were too many Parisians in the house at the Moulin Rouge. So, if things have changed rather drastically in the last century, maybe they have changed less than I imagine in the last decades.

Let me go out with an accolade. If I can’t say that, with just a few exceptions, I admired much about the show, I hugely admired the way the Friedrichstadtpalast people run an opening night. I’ve run a few myself, and know the difficulties. The vast audience of guests was ticketed, programmed, wined with utmost efficiency. So thank you, Friedrichstadtpalast for looking after me so nicely. I’m sorry Yma isn’t my cup of saki.

Well, the Köstritzer is all gone. Shame I only got one. And midnight is past. I shall sneak into bed and go to sleep thinking of the silver glitter falling from the heights and Olesya’s hair as that magnificent pair finished their act …

Postscript: This morning I have found my ticket stub, and it does not actually mention the word 'revue'. The theatre is described as 'Europas grösster und modernster Show-Palast' and the production as 'Die neue grosse mega-show'. 'Show' is, it seems, the replacement for 'revue' in the 21st century.

FischGrätenMelkStand.

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When I said to Anna, let’s go out together and do something ... see something … one day this week, I wasn’t really thinking of something like FischGrätenMelkStand. Because that sort of thing is way, way outside my experience. Even Ian, who loved modern art, who used to traipse me round the Galerie Maeght, and who once made me stand and look at a vast and ludicrous Jackson Pollock in Venice (he did apologise later) would, I think, have been a bit puzzled in the presence of FischGrätenMelkStand. But, how do you know if you don’t try? So I put on my walking shoes, and headed off through the city – tiens! there’s the Gendarmenmarkt! I am beginning to see how Berlin’s bits fit together – to the Schlosspark and its Temporary Kunsthalle. It is temporary (and due to be demolished this week) because the whole area where the old ‘Schloss’ stood is under reconstruction. It would make a nice park, I thought, but I fear it is going to be a ‘reconstruction’.

 

The exhibition with the funny name (it means one of those milking parlours where the cattle stand interlocked, head to head) consists of a four-story metal jungle-gym (thus the name), built up with staircases and rooms, in each of which rooms is featured an exhibit of some kind. I’m not sure if there is ‘meaning’ anywhere in there: I didn’t try to find any. Once we were let in (there was a vast queue, as the construction can hold only 40 people), I just clambered up and down and looked. Quite a few of the things seemed to be damaged, or have their video and/or audio components out of order, but I just took what I was seeing for what I was seeing, and … When we emerged, nearly an hour later, and sat down with a quiet beer in the café, I said to myself: well? The answer to ‘well?’ was that, as a whole, the series of ‘rooms’ were just an ‘art gallery’, and the ‘art’ they contained? … twenty-four hours later, as I write this, exactly the same images remain, now as then, remarkably vividly, in my mind. A group of handbags on a wall, ‘magically’ tossing their own shadows – by some filmic process – round and round (and unphotographically) in circles

 

and a rough wooden room lined with rows of burned pizzas and entitled ‘Mutter Tod mit Pepperoni’ (Martin Kippenberger/Heimo Zobernig). I don’t know what Mrs Death had to do with things, but – in spite of the fact that the exhibit had suffered destructively from knees and shoulderbags -- the dilapidated rows of pizzas were strangely compelling!

 

There was an cleverly unpleasant-feeling piece, Vinyl Terror and Horror, featuring distressed electronic equipment enclosed in a filthy caravan, and Anna was particularly taken by the ‘Backstage’ which I imagine represented the ‘artist’s’ or ‘caretaker’s room and which enclosed a vast variety of crazed and crumpled and ‘rejected’ bits and pieces, which may or may not have been still where the creator had put them.

 

There was a good deal more, a great deal more, but those are the bits I remember. And only once did I sneer the sneer that says ‘oh this is just tiresome’: in an item called ‘sexy socks’ (the title already is wearisome) where, sadly, drearily, the creators fell back on juvenile ‘naughty words’ for their ‘cleverness’. Yawn… From the FischGrätenMelkStand we made our way the nearby Friedrichswerdesche Kirche. This C19th, neo-Gothic building was, of course, in considerable contrast to what we had just seen, but there was a surprise. It is now an art gallery, too, and its soaring space contains a selection of (copies of?) classical sculpture. But amongst those sculptures was a well-staged contemporary piece by Yinka Shonibara entitled 'Colonel Tarleton and Mrs Oswald shooting'. I found it very effective and, yes, perfectly comprehensible ... indeed, I was altogether pleased, until I read the heavy-handed publicity blurb, with all its effortful politics and points. I don't want to be told what to see, thank you. If the artist can't make his point in his art...?

 

This morning, I have also read the hand-out material on the FischGrätenMelkStand. And now I don’t like it nearly so much. So much pompous stuff about ‘spatial situations’ and artworks ‘fusing with space’ and … it is all so pretentious and unreadable, quite the perfect poison with which to eradicate the enjoyment one can get simply by looking at the works in question. I am binning it, as of this moment, wiping it from my brain, and I shall just keep my agreeable images of handbags and pizzas, thank you.

 

My day ended, in suitably ‘cosmopolitan’ fashion with dinner with Kevin in a Brazilian restaurant down near the Schwules Museum, where his exhibition has been breaking all house records of affluence. And, to end a colourful day on a high, the buffet eat-as-much-as-you-can meal turned out to be stunning – from a first-class fish soup, to a truly wonderful beef (?), black sausage and black bean stew that had me longing for a larger appetite. The Café do Brasil, 72 Mehringdamm, is unchallengeably the best value-for-money feast I have eaten, anywhere, since I set out from New Zealand … And then to bed, to dream of revolving handbags, burned pizzas, and delicious fish soup…

'At Home' in the Krumme Strasse

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When you are travelling incessantly, the nicest thing that can happen is to be invited to spend an evening snuggled up in the midst of somebody else’s quiet and comfy ‘home’ atmosphere…
Paul (otherwise PGB, otherwise Paul Graham Brown the musical-theatre writer) and his partner, Uwe, asked me around and ‘in’ for a delicious chick pea stew, imaginative ice-cream, a little vin rouge and, above all, a cosy evening of ‘en famille’ friendship and fun…
It felt soooooo goood …

A Visit to Sissi

I’d thought, when I returned to Berlin, that I would be carrying on my cavalcade through the restaurants of Europe .. but somehow, one way and another, that hasn’t come to pass. Give or take my Jamaican and Irish adventures, most of my food and drink jollification, over the last month, has happened round the picknick table, right here at no 32 Nollendorfstrasse.

Livia’s win, however, had to be fêted in suitable style, so – after a nice cold apéritif of French bubbly, round my little red table – PGB and I set out in search of a nice place to eat. And we found one. When first I came back to the Nollendorfstrasse, my friend Horst pointed me in the direction of a tiny, Austrian restaurant named – what else – Sissi. There it was, just round the corner in the Motzstrasse. And, goodness me, Horst was right.



Tiny, charming, delightful staff and ... well, I have honestly to say, better food than I have ever eaten, anywhere, in Vienna itself. And at very reasonable prices. I had a consommé with a nice light leberknoedel, followed by what the English menu described as boiled calf carpaccio. The mind boggled. But it was delicious thin slices of cold boiled beef, served with a tiny light salad … delicious, and you come out at the end (as I like to do) thinking you have eaten nothing. Paul had a gulasch. Now I’ve seen all sorts of gulasches in my life and most of them would sink a sailor. Not this one. This is food for enjoying, not for simply swelling your stomach. And that means, of course, that grown-ups have space for pudding: Paul could not resist an apricot dumpling…
Our meal was completed by a nice bottle of Pinot (28 euros, wines in restaurants and bars here are grotesquely expensive – 200 to 400pc markup), served with decided talent by a young waiter who made the single bottle last tidily and precisely through our meal, instead of slurping it forcefully into the glasses in the hope the customer will order a second bottle…
We saved ourselves for the Châteauneuf du Pape (11euros at Kaiser’s Supermarket) waiting for us, nightcappishly, back at the Nollendorfstrasse.
A delightful evening. A delightful restaurant. I am already booked for a return visit Thursday… and that will not certainly be the last during my month-to-go in Berlin. Would it be too much to hope that one of the horses might win again, too?

Oh, Livia!

Back in May – goodness, how long ago was that -- I blogged hopefully, from the northern hemisphere, about the latest addition to the ‘Gerolstein’ stable of racers .. our little Australian filly, Livia Degerolstein.
She had begun her baby two year-old career quite promisingly – four starts for a third and three fourths, which looked as if they could be fairly soon improved on. The idea of a first ever Gerolstein juvenile winner, and of my first harness-racing win in Australia – to add to those already scored in New Zealand and in France -- didn’t look impossible. But it didn’t happen.
Without ever running badly, Livia just didn’t seem to make that extra bit of progress necessary to snare her a race, and, after a couple of nowheres, instead of lining up for the big races we had looked forward to, she instead went out to have a little rest. All our rosy hopes looked doomed: the season was drawing to its end – soon she would no longer be a two year-old.
Then, suddenly, last week, as I scanned the Down Under racing pages from my flatlet in Berlin’s Nollendorfstrasse, I noticed … Livia was back! With a fortnight to go till September 1st. Was there still a smidgin of hope?
It didn’t look like it. She went to Geelong August 16, and finished seventh of nine, she went to Maryborough, just three days later, and got fourth of six. She was, as ever, running on at the end, but why oh why, no matter where drawn, did she always seem to end up at the too-far-back of the pack in the running?
One last chance. Geelong again, today 26 August. And the competition included the two horses, Blissful Kisses and Saunders Girl, that had dead-heated for second when she had been seventh there ten days ago, as well as a filly dropping back from the classic races we had once eyed hopefully for Livia. The public took the obvious view, and Livia, sporting a nice new red nose-roll, went out at odds of 20-1. Sixth fancy out of eight.
The classic filly blew up at the start, an outsider hooned suicidally to the front and .. sure enough, as they got to the bell, Livia had managed to get herself into second last place, maddeningly off the slipstreaming back of the one in front of her. Happily, the one behind her was Saunders Girl, and she was pulled swiftly out to loop the field as they headed into the final section. Livia tagged gappily on to her wheel, followed her around, three wide on the last turn, and as Saunders Girl and Blissful Kisses settled down, it seemed, to battle it out, down the middle of the track came stomping Livia! There was a heart-stopping second as she put in one short stride, but then she stuck her tough little head forward, bullocked on, and several strides before the post she elbowed past her rivals to hit the line with nearly half a length to spare!
Within ten days, she had turned round a distance of ten metres on the two runners-up, in the respectable mile time of 2mins 02.4. That ‘improvement’ we had been waiting for had well and truly happened, and that two year-old win, which had seemed so improbable just days earlier, had actually come to pass!
So, tonight – while Wendy (give or take the time difference) raises a glass to little Livia, and to trainer-driver Graeme Lang, down in Gerolstein, New Zealand – I and my pal PGB will do the same at the Nollendorfstrasse …

Goodness, what a horsey year! Elena wins (in NZ while I’m in Australia), Tenor wins (in France while I’m in Australia again), Seppl wins twice (in NZ while I’m in the Isle of Wight) and now Livia wins .. in Australia while I’m in Germany! I’m not complaining, but hopefully, one day soon, my winners and I may be in the same place at the same time? But as my friend Jack – who last week scored a zinger at Cabourg, France -- says, they never are.

http://www.harness.org.au/video/vic/GEC26081006.wmv

Life is a Kabarett

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When Hannes told me that Cabaret was playing at TIPI am Kanzleramt – that delightful ‘tent’ venue in the Tiergarten -- I have to say I didn’t rush there. How many times have I seen Cabaret over the last forty years? I can’t count. And Cabaret in German? Ah well, I guess its part of the same ‘good old days’ thing that I recognised in this afternoon’s 'Modernen Zeit’ exhibition. But then other folk, too, told me I ‘should’ see it (why? I wondered) and so last night I strolled up to the grand, green Tiergarten from my home in the Nollendorfstrasse (30 minutes flat, even with the ghastly pedestrian lights), and met up with Hannes and Anna for a night ‘at the musical’. TIPI is, in fact, an ideal venue for this show. It is sufficiently compact, and it has the right ‘Kabarett’ atmosphere. Even more ideal, to my thinking, would be the companion Bar Jeder Vernunft, where this production was originally staged, in a version that has been (sometimes too obviously) now opened out for this larger platform … and, of course, auditorium.

 

The original stage musical Cabaret was not a huge success, and it owes its continuing life very largely to its film version and the performance therein of Liza Minnelli in the role of Sally Bowles. The filmmakers, alas, in search of youth and beauty, destroyed the show’s two most interesting, central – and ageing -- characters (Herr Schultz and Frln Schneider), so I am always very happy indeed to get back to the original theatre text. Or something like it. The TIPI version – and boy! how many ‘versions’ of Cabaret have there been, tacked together by royalty-chasers and usually involving chunks of the film – seems to me to be sufficiently back-to-basics (I admit to a groan when a yowled chunk of ‘Maybe This Time’ was tacked in), but there were some bits which I didn’t think I recognised. This may simply be because it’s so long since I heard an un-butchered performance of Cabaret. This production’s principal curiosity was to have the text in German, and the lyrics sung in either English or German or, in the disastrous case of ‘Cabaret’, half and half.

 

The stage production was suitably ‘of today’. The first half was slick, quick-moving, occasionally visually arresting (a practical train outdid Miss Saigon’s helicopter easily), it didn’t seem to run nearly 100 minutes, and it was pretty loud and pretty soulless. But, come half time, the whole thing changed gear. Suddenly the audience (mostly ladies with hair, why?) was no longer giggling at the romantic and emotional Schultz-Schneider scenes, but cooing; suddenly the Sally, who had done little more than shout and flail her way through the first half, started to act; suddenly we had a play. A musical play. Instead of an agreeable but pretty banal heap of lively camping and leaping around. And I cheered inwardly. I guess it depends what you want Cabaret to be. For me the Schultz/Schneider story is the heart of the show. Miss Bowles is a supporting character. But, of course, since Liza Minnelli, the musical and the character are no longer allowed or expected to be like that. We don’t get the silly little English Sally Bowles as written by Isherwood and van Druten, we get Liza Minnelli Bowles. Topbilled. And there aren’t a handful of performers, maybe even a fingerful, in the world who can ‘be’ Liza Minnelli Bowles in such a way as not to suffer horribly in comparison with the lady they are apeing. I was pretty sure I was in trouble as soon as tonight’s Sally (Sophie Berner) walked on. She was wearing a Liza Minnelli wig. Oh, dear, I thought. It is going to be a that sort of production of Cabaret. Well, happily, it didn’t turn out quite that way, and that very largely thanks to some decidedly fine performances elsewhere in the cast. 

Easily my favourite performer of the evening was the Cliff (Guido Kleineidam). How often does that happen? That Cliff is the strongest character in this musical? Almost never, I would say. And, guess what, it gives the piece a great focus. The 'I' who is 'the camera' is important and central, and not just an 'instrument'. Unlike the lady, Kleineidam never forgot to act for a second, and he established a credible, interesting and moving personality right from the start. And in the tiny bit he has to sing, he even turned up with a most agreeably uneffortful baritone. It was thoroughly due to him that the Cliff-Sally relationship developed any shape and any interest at all, and his final departure from Berlin, surrounded by the debris of his Berlin life, was decidedly the most moving moment of an evening which didn’t go in for very many moving moments. A first-class performance. 

Frln Schneider (Regina Lemnitz as replacement for Maren Kroymann) and Herr Schultz (Peter Kock), who turned out, miraculously, both to have wholly agreeable singing voices, played their scenes well – though they were left standing curiously ‘undirected’ in the middle of an open stage during confrontations which cry out for intimacy. They made ‘Heirath’ into the musical hit of the night ... I was humming it in the interval and again after the show. They also both played their characters as pleasantly ‘ordinary’ everyday people: the role of Frln Schneider, often star cast, can easily become overcooked. She is a boarding-house keeper. Here, reality remained, and the show gained greatly. So much for the ‘real’ people of the tale. Except, of course, Sally should be one of these, too. I haven’t enthused over any Sally since I saw her played, with touching naivety (and plenty of voice), by a little blonde ex-chorine at Farnham Repertory Theatre in the 1980s. I guess that lass hadn’t seen the movie, or else she had the sense to know that she wasn’t equipped to compete with the Minnelli image. So much the better for her. And me. Tonight’s shapeless Sally was all over the place. She blasted her way through act one, with nary an ounce of light and shade, and just when – in the second act – one started to feel that there was a real and sympathy-worthy woman hiding under that tacky wig, she came out with shudderworthy, draggy, misshapen versions of ‘Maybe This Time’ and ‘Cabaret’ which seemed to have nothing to do with the rest of the show or the (otherwise very effective) orchestrations. No. As the youth of today say: ‘fail’. 

 The role of the emcee (Eric Rentmeister) was efficiently played – in song, speech and dance – in the established, but now rather uninteresting, Joel Grey style, the four Kit Kat girls (one an extremely clever male, Mogens Eggemann) were choreographed, in the manner we are supposed to believe has something to do with the 1930s, in a most lively, vigorous and enjoyable set of routines, and the small parts were all competently played. Except one. How on earth did the director permit the amateurish, end-of-the-pier portrayal of Frln Kost? Has he (and she) never heard of ‘less is better’? This woman’s pantomimish antics took the edge off the scenes of Frln Schneider’s romance and also off the climactic end of act one. The two key moments of the evening’s drama were almost ruined by an inept clown. 

I realise that my comments here do contain a lot of negatives. But, at the end of the show, I am happy to say that (as the ladies with hair squealed out jolly volleys of hoorays) I really didn’t feel too bad at all. I wasn’t complaining about the sum total of the evening's entertainment. Cliff had been superb, Schultz and Schneider very fine … and that meant that the show’s heart had been sweetly and dramatically solid. Sally? I’d more or less given up on her as soon as I saw the wig, and I simply didn’t let her bother me too much. She was back where she should be: a supporting character. Frln Kost, of course, did bother me .. but then, to make up for her, we had the train! A Cabaret with a solid heart will do me. Especially when it is as vigorously enlivened by its Girls and by its orchestra as this one is, and especially when it is played in such a friendly venue … but I think I may now go for a few years without seeing another version – any version – of this musical. Enough is enough is enough.

Berlin on a roller-coaster

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Yes, that means what it sounds like. My budding love affair with this city has not run altogether smoothly.
What went wrong? There was I on a huge high after my Best Concert Night Out probably ever … and the next thing …
Friday. Arrangements awry and suddenly … unreasoning panic. Alone in a big city, where I can’t speak the language, and where this machine is my only contact with an outside world which seems to have vanished… Where is everyone? Anyone? Living their own lives, of course. Off on holidays, away or out on business, other folk to see, but not around ... Probably someone was on the end of a sanity-saving txt, but I don’t have a phone.
The sky clouded over, and the rains came down, and as I sat imprisoned through Saturday and half of Sunday, in my normally beloved no32, listening to the man next-door doing loud repairs, the man downstairs doing ditto ... with no escape to .. where? .. through the storm … uselessly spiralling into a real and wholly untypical tempest of lonesome blues … I could only think: I want to be back at Gerolstein. Have I stayed away too long?
And the realisation punched itself into my brain: how could I ever, ever have imagined that I could make a home base in a city where I don’t speak the language? Where I can’t even go out to a bar or a resto, if I should want to, and chat to some jolly company, on a horrid weekend like this one, because I’m half-deaf and foreign and, anyway, too many places here don’t take credit cards? The Berlin real-estate books, which had, in my imagination, been invitingly half-open since I got back here, closed that weekend with a definitive bang. What was I thinking of? End of dream. End of wonderful but foolish dream.



The mean blue moment passed, of course. Dear PGB arrived back in truly timely fashion from his hiking in Croatia, and we dined out in the Winterfeldstrasse on Sunday, picknicked on floods of bubbly and smoked salmon and a whirl of gossip on Monday, and on Tuesday I went out on the town, for a delicious night out with the boys … Life was back on wheels again, but that wicked wet weekend had left its traces. I was going to have to work at it, to once again feel as wholly comfortable here as I did a fortnight ago. Needless to say, I am winning the war. But I’d rather have not needed to.

My night out with the boys – Thomas H, Thomas Z, Christian and Ollie -- was a treat. We started off at the Soho Club – an up-to-date version of the old English ‘Gentlemen’s Club’ (though they have ladies as well, now) implanted semi-congruously into the heart of Berlin. On the superb ‘roof-terrace’, a delightful rounded bar, a swimming pool, and a view out over the Berlin rooftops, which the rain rendered rather surreal …



From the Soho Club to the Chamaleon, a proper European-style cabaret room – central platform surrounded by tables -- where the entertainment was an act named ‘Versus’ – eight young acrobat-dancers in a very strenuous, skilled, agreeable and sometimes even imaginative modern version of the circus routines we’ve known since circus was invented. My mind flew back to Barnum days. Where were young folk like this when I was casting in the ‘eighties?
From the show, on to a real Berlin gay bar, by the name of ‘Betty F’ (in homage to Mrs Ford) .. and hey! not only could I hear in the small room with its moderate music, but I found I was thoroughly enjoying myself amid our delightful company. Still, elderly gentleman have to take care, and I tip-taxied away at midnight, leaving the lads to their foreseeable long, long night..
Thursday, out to Kreuzberg with Ollie to ... wait for it ... a Jamaican restaurant. Well, why not? Delicious spicy food, a touch of genuine Jamaica rum to finish … thank you Kirk and Troy of the Rosa Caleta, Muskauer Strasse, a grand evening … with a surprising result. Next day, Ollie turned up at no32 bearing the prophylactic for the previous weekend’s blues … a mobile phone! After all these years of saying ‘I can’t’, I have already learned to text! Slowly. Maybe next week I may see if I can hear a call: but I find it quite hard, already, to hear the thing tinkle ... so we shall have to see.



Saturday, a lovely family evening with the Leclair-Clarkes – dining on a real ‘Ulster Fry’ (the children are just back from holiday in Ireland, and brought the stock of the local butcher’s shop with them) and -- this you are never going to believe – watching not only the holiday snaps of beautiful Ireland but … a movie! Kevin and Maxime biked to the store to get the ‘for hearing-impaired English-speakers’ version of Hangover, and I got used to ‘listening’ to it quite quickly. The film was American-silly-funny (and laced with plot incoherencies) but I can see it will be much liked by filmgoers.

Sunday night, a picknick with Kevin – music and bubbly and a whole fortnight’s worth of catch up -- and today, out to the new Nationalgalerie for a very fine and admirable exhibition entitled Modernen Zeit.



The times it dealt with were, happily, not so modern as that: it was an exhibition of art from the first 40 years of the 20th century, a period which this country seems now to have idealised as ‘the good old days’. I don’t know a heap about German 20th century painting – one knows the name of Grosz for not entirely pictorial reasons, Kirschner and Dix ring a bell, but the French artists of the same years, when they were busy inventing cubism and the like and lunching out at St Paul de Vence, are obviously much more familiar to me. So I was rather delighted to see a great deal of strong and often colourful painting in all sorts of styles, which seemed to show that the German painters of the time had perhaps more individualism than their French counterparts. I particularly liked one room of elbow-to-elbow portraits, all from the same years but yet all so contrasting in style … alas, I couldn’t stop my camera flashing, so one photo was all I got … this is only a tiny sample of the collection … but the bug-eyed family in the middle is the star exhibit…



Alongside the exhibition, a multi-part silent film of Berlin in the 1920s was playing. I watched about 20 minutes of it, and could only think .. 1920? those men could be my grandfather, and oh! how different the world was…

Tonight, back to the Tipi .. the tent-theatre .. to see (is this an anomaly?) a German-language version of the musical Cabaret …
Oh yes, my Berlin is well and truly back on wheels and, as September looms, my dance card is filling rapidly with opera, with theatre premieres, with coffee dates, lunches and events, the colourful memories of which I shall be able to live on for many a quiet country month ..

I shall enjoy Berlin in the summer, I just sha’n’t get involved.
And next time I come here, I shall, I think, avoid August. I don’t ever want to live another weekend like that one I just lived…

ESPANA ... one hundred points!

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It is summer in Berlin. Everywhere you look, vast bunches of sunflowers symbolise the fact … and I am riding high on Berlin in summer.
So far, it’s been largely Picknicks at number 32, catching up with those friends who aren’t out of town for the holidays: on Friday Kevin and sister Sandra called by, and nephew Maxime got his first taste of Châteauneuf du Pape (‘its never too early’), and Saturday, my dear friend Ollie came and we chatted and drowned ourselves in bubbly way, way past the witching hour and my usual bedtime. On Saturday Paul returned bearing the almost final cut of the CD he has been working on, and no32 became a sound bowl as we listened to the recording which we hope will take Montmorensy, his name and work, to the millions. I am quite staggered with what he has done and, even though I have heard all the material before, I was overwhelmed by the effect of hearing it en dazzling bloc. God, Gänzl, you most absolutely can spot talent!



Off to Winterfeldplatz market to buy flowers for my room, to order some more of the delicious hand-made visiting cards I discovered here in April, to investigate the charcuterie and the cheeses and all the other goodies. Tragic, that this market is only here one and a half days a week: if it were permanent I’d be moving into this street for good! Which I even may, yet…

Monday 9 August. I’ve been here a week. And – even though PGB and Kevin are away -- the planning of my summer is well under way. It is going to be a summer of music. It is about time that music found its way back into my life, after those years in the sad wilderness, and I have found myself a very darling Dante (or did Virgil do the leading?) to guide me …
As we nibbled our picknick, after the Montmorensy concert, last week, Paul and I began to plan 'summer music in Berlin’. Well, the bollard outside this flat advertises the Young Euro Classic series of orchestral concerts at the Berlin Konzerthaus. Sounded good, so we pulled up the programmes on the web. Lots of fun stuff, lots of new music, but the concert that leaped out at us was the one to be given by the Joven Orquesta Nacional de España. And it just happened to be on Monday night. It also happened – hey! Kurt the Victorian – to be made up entirely of twentieth-century music.
So this evening, off we set. A little visit to the record store for some educational material – four Händel oratorios and a disc of Janácek piano music. Then to the delightful Café Augustiner am Gendarmenmarkt for a pair of delicious boiled white sausages (me) and a heap of mountain cheese (Paul). And, finally, the Konzerthaus.



The Konzerthaus still has the old ‘Tageskasse’ and ‘Abendkasse’ system (2 euros cheaper for ‘standby’ tickets with no 'booking fee'), but I don’t know why they bother. The first thing that is blazingly obvious when, having negotiated the horde of little men in red bowties who infest every corner of the magnificent Konzerthaus, doing nothing but look bored, we entered the top tier of the salle (only seats available, 17 euros), was that there was no money in the house. It was assiduously and utterly papered with other young musicians and with members of the local Spanish community. But, as Paul remarked, if you are going to have paper, have Spanish paper: this audience gave the concert a howlingly enthusiastic reception. Which, I am here to say, it absolutely deserved.
However, when paying customers end up in the slips, gazing down on the tell-tale gaps in the papered stalls, it does give an unfortunate aura of unprofessionalism. Some sponsor is doubtless paying the whole jaunt for the young Spaniards.
The air of unprofessionalism, alas, continued a wee bit longer, for after a wholly splendid opening with a specially-written brass fanfare (my second this year!) by Manfred Trojahn, echoing down on us excitingly from the organ loft, we were obliged to suffer twelve and a half minutes of self-indulgent chatter from a certain Herr Lange of the Komische Oper, 'godfather' for the evening. Having quite destroyed the atmosphere created by the fanfare with his banal football jokes, he finally got off and the music was .. at past 20h15 already .. actually able to start. But it turned out to be worth the waiting for.



The first piece on the programme was Cristóbal Halffter’s Tiento del primer tono y batalla imperial which, as far as I could work out from the programme (1 euro and carelessly misprinted), is based on 15th and 16th-century Spanish music. It is, however, ‘retold’ here in a thoroughly modern style. I fell utterly, enthusiastically and totally for this picture-piece with its screamingly vibrant clashes between ancient and modern. I have never heard a piece of music which portrays the conflict of man with man so searingly. And the young orchestra flung themselves into its strident and violent emotions with the most amazing vigour and with evident enjoyment.
And now, I was delighted to be up in the slips, peering down over the orchestra, able to watch every soloist and section … unable to take my eyes from the young lady on the contra-bassoon, the much-used timpaniste, or the beautiful-toned horn player …
How to follow such an evident success? Why, with Strauss’s Don Juan. And they quite simply did it again. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this piece played with such warmth and vivacity. ‘This is what orchestras were invented for’ ran irreverently through my head… ‘This is the concert of my life’.
It probably is. Though the second part could never hope to equal that dazzling first. A group of songs by Xavier Montsalvatge, sung by an attractive mezzo, Magdalena Llamas, showed up for the first and only time the disadvantage of our seats. The lady played solely to the radio mike and the front rows: we saw little and heard not much more of what seemed to be an unexceptional group of rather ‘film-musik 1945’ songs, of which a pretty lullaby made most effect. The stalls, I need to record, went mad for the singer. The slips, of course, couldn’t.
And so to the final item on the bill: Petruschka. I’m not sure quite why – everything else had had a Spanish connection. Also it was the orchestral suite manufactured from the ballet music, rather than the real thing, so I – who know only the ballet – did get rather confused. The thing seems rather shapeless without its story and its visuals. But maybe this is part of my learning curve. What Petruschka did do, was allow the whole panoply of young principals each to have her or his moment, and in that it was well chosen, for each and every one of them – especially the wind players, and a remarkable set of horns and cornets – took that moment skilfully and gleefully.

Gleefully: that is what made this concert so special. The young players were so evidently having a most wonderful time making music together, and their joy was wholly infectious. Since the programme chosen was (mostly) marvellous, as well, the result was an evening of the most enjoyable music imaginable.
The audience (and the orchestra!) stamped and cheered and applauded fit to bust at the concert’s end, leading to first an encore with a rather common march, and then – o wise judgement – a repeat of the second part of that wonderful ‘klingendes’ Halffter piece. What a note to go out on!



They almost didn’t. In the dreadful habit of this part of the world, the band lingered for just one too many a round of applause, one too many set of bows, and the thrilled atmosphere began to sag as half the audience wandered from the auditorium. But then, in a wonderful finale, the players each hugged his or her neighbour and put a splendid Punkt to the proceedings, a fullstop to a wonderful musical night.
Paul and I proceeded back to the Augustiner for a cold beer, and of course a look to see what other joys this Festival may hold for us – between his music-making and my social and writing schedule – in the days to come…
I wonder if I can make sure that Mr Lange’s peroration isn’t a nightly affair. I wonder if I can get on the ‘paper’ list for Austria or Bulgaria or Azerbaijan. Actually, unless there is a singer, I ... a life long habitué of Row G in the stalls ... might prefer to climb again to the slips ..
Gracious. Music is coming back to me .. I can feel it … I went home on the U2 to Nollendorfplatz singing the tenor aria from the Rossini Stabat Mater! Well, Halffter is a little tricky to hum…
So thank you Spain, thank you Konzerthaus, thank you my Magister Paul ... I think I’m on the road back!