Berlin Music Festival: Everything is boiling, everything is in question

America? “I’m so tired of you America,” sings Rufus Wainwright in his song “Going To A Town” and explains in a background report on the accompanying video that he thinks America is “beautiful, but thorny.” In the Trump era, this song, which was written in 2007 and also covered by George Michael in 2011, took on an additional bitter note.

America is the motto with which the Musikfest Berlin under director Winrich Hopp advocates for an expansion of the canon of 20th century music: namely, to increasingly present works from the Americas, i.e. by composers such as John Adams and Heitor Villa-Lobos , Alberto Ginastera, Ruth Crawford-Seeger and, above all, Charles Ives, who not only composed some of the most radical music of the first half of the 20th century, but also made a name for himself as a promoter and even patron of Pan-American modernism.

But the 2024 music festival is not just about making the audience aware of American music. American orchestras were also explicitly invited: not just those from North America, but also from South America, and not just those like the renowned ones “big five” the USA, but also the Kansas City Symphony. Diversity is the program!

And so last Saturday the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra under its Swiss chief conductor Thierry Fischer organized the ultimately inspiring opening concert. The small caveat applies to the unfortunately somewhat vague opening, “Central Park in the Dark” by Charles Ives from 1906 to 1909, revised in 1936 and only premiered in New York in 1946. Certainly, the strings circling around themselves in daring fourths “embody the sounds of night and the silence of the darkness,” as the composer noted. And the rest of the orchestra interrupts them with a variety of noises: we hear street singers and revelers singing fragments of radio hits of their time or “whistling the march of the Yale freshmen,” sounds “from the elevated train that occasionally passes by,” ragtime sounds from the apartments, etc street band, a fire engine; Suddenly everything culminates in a rapid and almost derailing climax, only to immediately disappear, the darkness can be heard again, “an echo that sounds across the pond… and then we go home.”

Ives collaged all of these sounds – namely “sounds of nature and events that one could hear in the past (before cars and radio dominated the earth and the air)” – but did not compose them with a kind of samples like his contemporary Mahler, but rather mounted next to and on top of each other. This montage creates a pull of darkness – but it is also allowed to shine, which unfortunately could not be experienced in the somewhat indecisive and indecisive interpretation of the orchestra from São Paulo.

It was completely different with the Violin Concerto op. 30 by the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera, a work commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered by this orchestra in 1963 under Leonard Bernstein with Ruggiero Ricci as soloist. The violinist Roman Simovic, born in Lviv, Ukraine in 1981, who plays the solo part for the originally announced Hilary Hahn, approaches the sprawling, five-minute-plus solo cadenza with which the work begins with power and an occasionally brutalist tone. It is a dialogue with yourself; Tender sequences are repeatedly incorporated before the soloist and orchestra work on this material together in six “studies”.

The expressive second movement, reminiscent of Bartók, is wonderful, an Adagio for 22 soloists, in which there is no longer a solo or tutti, but everyone makes music together in a comradely manner, so to speak. In the last movement, a tattered scherzo that begins with whispering, barely audible tones from the soloist, then quotes themes from Paganini’s 24th Caprice and ends with a short perpetuum mobile in which the soloist has to assert himself against aggressive attacks from the percussion.

Ginastera’s bold violin concerto shows that the composer dealt intensively with surrealism, serialism, microtonality and aleatoric music in his late phase, which he himself described as “neo-expressionist”. A difficult work, not only extremely demanding for the soloist, but also for the listeners. Roman Simovic handled it brilliantly, and the audience’s rousing applause also seemed to indicate understanding for the work, which one would definitely like to hear more often in concerts. Simovic played a Ysaÿe sonata as an encore, gripping, wild and emotional.

The best comes at the end of this long concert: Edgar Varèse’s “Amériques”, composed between 1918 and 1922. The program notes that its premiere in 1926 by Leopold Stokowski was a “success” that “inspired” the composer. Well, the opposite may have been the case: The New York Times described “Amériques” as “completely wrong” and declared it a “scandalous piece,” which the audience didn’t need to be told twice and hissed at the New York premiere , gesticulated, whistled and shouted as much as he could. “Amériques” became a scandalous piece, like Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” in Paris 13 years earlier. Varèse’s next work, “Arcana,” was even described by one critic as a “clay piggy.”

Edgard Varèse, “the idol of my youth” for Frank Zappa, was hated by the bourgeoisie not only as a composer, but even more so as a class opponent. Varèse knew Lenin and Trotsky well, he was a conductor of communist workers’ choirs, and during the Spanish Civil War he raised money for the defenders of the republic who fought against the Francoists allied with Nazi Germany.

Varèse had founded the New York Symphony Orchestra in 1919, which worked on a cooperative basis for the purpose of disseminating new music, not least in view of the “comprehensive crisis of the performer as a socially responsible being” (Konrad Boehmer); Of course, every musician had a share in the project’s profits.

One would do well to understand a composer like Varèse as more than just a musical revolutionary. And perhaps the best thing is: Varèse’s music is completely useless for the purposes of the culture industry. Because »Amériques« is a total transgression of borders. Everything is boiling, everything is being questioned. A siren can be heard throughout the entire piece, no wonder, the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra sets the Berlin Philharmonic on fire.

The monumental orchestra – nine players alone are needed for the restless percussion, whose instruments also include a bass drum with a wire brush, whips and yes: “lion’s roar”! – rages on with confusing sounds, signals and motifs, and a huge, electrifying noise arises, which continually increases for 25 minutes, subsides, and then returns like a thunderous tsunami sound wave even louder and more exuberant, all the way to a very final, unreal one booming apotheosis of sound power that sweeps the listener and everyone and everything away. Storms of cheers.

The symphony orchestra from São Paulo and its outstanding conductor Thierry Fischer have previously performed at their best with Heitor Villa-Lobos’ “Uirapurú”, but after their interpretation of Varèse’s solitaire, one wishes to hear them again in Berlin soon.

America? Americas!

The concert of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra can be enjoyed from August 30th. until September 29th in the media library of Berlin Music Festival be listened to.