Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra: Fire and Ice

The Whitsun music this year was music without gravity. She floats freely in space like a cloud of fire and ice. Initially static, then liquefied and transformed, it swims towards an abyss and finally disappears as a breath, into nothingness. Has neither melody, nor rhythm, nor basic bass. Is out of this world.

“Atmosphère” by György Ligeti, whose hundredth birthday was on Pentecost Sunday, has been played by almost all major orchestras around the world in recent weeks. The Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra also opened its latest subscription concert, conducted by the Israeli star conductor Lahav Shani.

Preferably one more time

Shani hits exactly. Luminously transparent, at the same time shimmering opaque, this non-music, now more than sixty years old, blossoms out of 87 intertwined micropolyhon individual voices. The effect is still tremendous today, as it was on the first day. When “Atmosphère” fades out, in a nine-second pause, one wishes for an immediate repeat.

This is what happened to the audience at the premiere in Donaueschingen in 1961. That’s how it was for us again. Perhaps the astonishingly young audience in the main hall of the Konzerthaus no longer has the cult film “Space Odyssey” on their radar, into which Stanley Kubrick integrated this and other music by Ligeti. But it’s mesmerized by the music.

Amazing young crowd

When the Swedish clarinettist Martin Fröst shows up, it snaps. Fröst has the aura of a pop star, he enriches his performance with bizarre leaps, as if he were a blond double of ETA Hoffmann’s literary figure of Kapellmeister Kreisler. But he also knows about the magical nuances that Aaron Copland’s clarinet concerto needs to have an effect.

Accompanied only by strings, harp and piano, the virtuoso piece is folksy and tabloid, rich in syncopation and quotations, jazzy, of course painted over with Broadway elegance. As an encore, Fröst, accompanied by Shani and the orchestra, serves the orgiastic “Klezmertanz 2”, composed by his brother, Goran Fröst. Standing ovations.

And the RSB? It always plays reliably. But on this evening, which brings together three very different, popular “smacks” from twentieth-century music, it builds up to breathtaking top form: strings like velvet and silk can be heard in Sergei Prokofjef’s “Romeo and Juliet” suite, each voice section for himself a color poem.

Each individual wind soloist, from the tuba to the piccolo, becomes a poet and sculptor in his solo performances, which also applies to the percussionists, harp and celesta. And so this stage music about love and death, transformed into a tableau-like picture story, leafs through page by page like a haptically colorful comic for the ears.