Programmbroschüre musikfest berlin 10 - Berliner Festspiele

musikfest berlin 10
37 world-class soloists, 27 choirs, ensembles and orchestras drawn from the cream of the
international musical crop – along with the orchestral flagships harboured in the
German capital: presenting in the course of 20 days, at Berlin’s Philharmonie and its
Chamber Music Hall, in the Parochialkirche and the Gethsemanekirche, and at the
Konzerthaus at the Gendarmenmarkt, 24 events featuring over 60 works by some 25
different composers. The dual focal point of these programmes: works by Pierre Boulez
and Luciano Berio. After last year’s look at the darker side of the “age of extremes”,
musikfest berlin 10 takes its cue from a line by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé – “the
virginal, lively and lovely today” – which Pierre Boulez set to music so inimitably in Pli
selon pli, that unique 20th-century gesture of musical “folding” with which, in 1958,
the year it was composed, Olivier Messiaen referred to the inalienable right of each new
generation to shape its own day and age.
It was Charles Baudelaire who, while poetically describing a ship in his diary, also
depicted the shape and idea of an orchestral body: “I think the infinite and mysterious
charm that lies in contemplating a ship, above all a ship in motion, is derived,
in the first place, from its regularity and symmetry, which are among the primordial
needs of the human spirit, and to the same extent as complexity and harmony;
and in the latter case, of motion, to the continual generation and multiplication
of all the imaginary curves and figures produced in space by the object’s
real elements. The poetic idea which arises from this process of linear motion is
the concept of some vast being, immense, complex, but rhythmic; a creature full
of genius, suffering and sighing with every human ambition.”
Luciano Berio, one of the two central composers of this year’s festival programme,
dreamt as a boy of being a captain and sailing his own ship out to sea. The dream
became a reality, but a musical one. Music became his seven seas, a lifelong odyssey
on which – stimulated by the anthropological writings of Claude Lévi-
Strauss, the ethnomusicological field research of Simha Aron, and the linguistics
of Roman Jacobson – the folk music traditions of Italy, France, Armenia and the
former Yugoslavia, as well as African and Native American tribal cultures, found
access into his works in quoted, phonographic, transcribed or newly composed
form. The Italian composer’s works being performed at musikfest berlin 10 are
log-books reporting these musical world travels: Folk Songs, the viola concerto
Voci, the oratorio-cum-madrigal Coro, the intimate tribute to Sicilian song Naturale
and, finally, the Sinfonia dedicated to Leonard Bernstein, Berio’s “Voyage à
Cythère” on the Mediterranean Sea of western art music.
This year’s musikfest berlin is dedicated especially to the oeuvre of Pierre Boulez,
a fellow composer close to Luciano Berio. Six months after his 85th birthday in
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