Konzerthaus on a Friday Night

So this week has seen yet another crisis that took up too much time. It would bore you, but it is important to know that we are still scrubbing bathroom floors and grocery shopping and standing in long communist-era lines and dodging doo-doo on the sidewalks.
Unlike when we have a stressful situation at home, we can escape here and let Sarah play poker with the kids while we go out to a concert at the Schauspielhaus. This was a building designed by Schinkel (you will remember that he is the architect/decorator/set designer who put his neo-classical/neo-gothic mark on Berlin). It sits in the middle of the Gendarmenmarkt between the French cathedral and the German cathedral and the whole plaza was memorialized in a story called "My Cousin's Corner Window" written by ETA Hoffmann, whom you know because he also wrote the story upon which the Nutcracker was based (and while we are way off topic, you should know that the story is a lot more bizarre and has a lot fewer corps de ballet and pas de deux than you might think).

We sat down not ten seconds before the Konzerthaus orchestra started filing out to their seats. The room was magnificent, and didn't appear to have a bad seat in it, proving that Schinkel was more than just a pretty face who enjoyed curlicues. There are life-sized busts of the great composers on the walls -- the major German ones on the main floor and the lesser/non-German ones above the top balcony. We sat nearest Beethoven who had the most reasonable hairstyle of any of the greats. We heard an overture from Schumann's opera "Genevova" which was fantastic, and then a cello concerto in A opus 129 which was also fabulous.
This was the conductor, Marc Piollet, who reminded me of Dean Criddle only taller and wearing tails. I have become more particular about my conductors in recent years. I balk at anyone who could be replaced by a metronome or one of those flapping bird toys -- I really don't like those. Herr Piollet was worth his salt. He danced, he jumped, he had staccato seizures -- he looked like Dick Van Dyck swinging around so loose-limbed it appeared that only his jacket was keeping him together. This was most evident in the second half, after we'd all filed out and gotten drinks next door and admired more of Schinkel's basilisks and griffins.

The orchestra performed a Brahms piece which was originally for four pianos, and had been orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg. It was phenomenal. I liked the first two movements, loved the third, and was absolutely bowled over by the Hungarian dance at the end. I can't say that Brahms would have been behind the use of a euphonium in his work, but who knows? One critic wrote that it is too bad for Brahms because once you hear the orchestrated version, you'll never want to go back to pianos.

After the concert, Rob and I walked around that end of town and saw a few of the buildings that are lit up artfully for the next couple of weeks: the French cathedral, the Altes Museum, the Berlin Cathedral, the TV tower are a few. If I can get some pictures, I'll put them up. There are rainbows, stars, and some sort of kokopelli thing on the Dom.