The Remarkable Social Spirit of Spectrum Concerts Berlin
By John Harris Beck (2006)
This fall the leading chamber group from Germany’s capital will debut in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall with two choice concerts: Helps’ Nocturne, Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet and Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night on November 3rd, with Penderecki’s Clarinet Quartet, Schulhoff’s String Sextet and the great Schubert String Quintet in C two nights later.
Artistic director Frank Dodge has created a “space” for some very gifted and mostly rather young musicians, all with major careers apart from Spectrum, who don’t simply “play engagements.” They truly engage each other and the audience, and raise the music to the level of sublime conversations. Janine Jansen, Julia-Maria Kretz, Maxim Rysanov, Antoine Tamestit, Torleif Thedéen and Jens Peter Maintz are the string sextet for the Schoenberg and Schulhoff, with Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer in the Penderecki and Brahms clarinet works.
Reviewers have showered praise on Spectrum Concerts Berlin for years, whether at the Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal or in recordings. “One of the finest Konzert-adressen in town.” “Wonderfully sculptured programs...” “Fervently commended.” “Exemplary readings... glorious to hear.” “Technically assured and searchingly elo-quent...” “Terrific ensemble playing...” “A superb disc, brilliantly played and recorded.” “Dedicated to this music as if it were its own.” As the large and devoted home audience knows, “Spectrum manages to be magical every time — as though a special spirit accompanies it.”
There is another dimension to this ensemble, however. As an American cellist arriving on that political island that was West Berlin, Frank Dodge found a city of operas and orchestras but no sustained chamber music. He also found no awareness of the mar-velous American music that had grown to maturity out of the European tradition. And in this peculiar political setting he also had the intuition that great, intimate musical per-formances could deepen the connection of the USA and Germany.
Like any American sensing opportunity, he launched his project with no initial backing but in the best halls, with few famous classics but with dozens of works by American composers mostly unknown in Berlin, and despite the local norm of government ap-provals and subsidies. A few years later the city was capital of a reunified nation, and Spectrum Concerts Berlin was already wondered at and very seriously listened to. Its accomplishment was such that a former US ambassador now leads the support team, and a former president of Germany is honorary chair. And both are devoted fans.
There is a rightness to chamber music as today’s cultural ambassador. Europe’s lost monarchy used splendid masques and dramas for state occasions. Even the poorest bystander could look up at a vision of national power and elegant behavior. Then mer-chants in their free cities took power. Great new forces were released by trade and colonization, by science and technology; landspeople became urban poor and com-modity labor, and refugees made a new life in America. Armaments grew, rivalries be-came hatred, and “the blind led the blind” quite literally “into a ditch.” The trenches, the butchery and the social exhaustion of “the Great War” were altogether an experience so demoralizing, so ignoble, that Ezra Pound would curse it as “an old bitch, gone in the teeth, a botched civilization.”
Yet something else had been happening. In those last few decades before 1914, “a thousand years of European culture” had blossomed in amazing science, astonishing art, and in a musical explosion which by itself could stand with the supreme achieve-ments of any culture of the past. Strauss, Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, Sibelius, Elgar, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Puccini, Scriabin, Stravinsky, — their masterworks were not written for kings, though Europe still had royalty. They were not accessories for the lifestyles of the nouveaux riches. They expressed a higher octave of the European striving, a powerful contrast to the brutality and cultural boorishness of colonialism and materialism. One might say that their music manifested just that breadth of vision and expression that is needed when humanity awakens for the first time as a global reality, beyond nations and empires. And its most transformative form is chamber music, where the audience is not overwhelmed but invited in.
When social leadership emerges from talent and earnestness and interconnectedness, from an unassuming self-reliance and mutual respect, then democracy achieves the true “ensemble” of chamber music. Would any country fail to thrive if even a tenth of its citizens took part in public life in this spirit? What if the politicians and generals and imperialists of 1914 had been inspired to listen, harmonize, cooperate?
Music may be a requirement for our full humanity. As Shakespeare so forcefully put it: “The man that has no music in him is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. Let no such man be trusted.”
Now Spectrum Concerts Berlin is reaching back across the Atlantic. It will be a joy to musiclovers, and the audience will include diplomats and business leaders, but is it a purely ephemeral bridge between cultures that Spectrum is building?
The notes always fade into silence, the applause rises and finally dies; but the wordless conversations resonate. All present have participated for a couple of hours in a genuine social ideal, and we walk away full of the most intimate music. Perhaps it is not so ephemeral.
John Harris Beck, 2006
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