MUSICALAMERICA.COM
September 8, 2003

Masur Leads Youth Orch in Schnittke
by Paul Moor

BERLIN - One can scarcely find words of praise adequate for the newest of Berlin's numerous music festivals, the one with the rather antic linguistically all-purpose name "young-euro-classic." Every year it brings together, in almost too rapid succession, a carefully selected elite of youth orchestras from all over the map, providing them an opportunity not only to strut their stuff in arguably the most intensely musical of world capitals but also to profit from hearing and meeting one another during their overlapping sojourns here, ensconced in high style in a former Prussian palace out on the water at the city's southwestern edge where Berlin ends and, just across the bridge, Potsdam begins. This year's festival ended Aug. 25 with a kind of postlude concert on aug. 31 by the Schleswig-Holstein Festival's own Youth Orchestra, conducted by Kurt Masur, 76. This seemed especially fitting, since few conductors of Masur's standing have devoted so much avuncular time and affection to aiding and abetting gifted young orchestral musicians as he has. This orchestra, domiciled in northwest Germany up at the Danish border, consisted of 130 young musicians from 31 countries. Masur had conducted the ensemble once before, in 1998.

The program included a 1998 quotation from him: "I have been blessed with enormous rewards in my life through music, but of all the things I do in this field, none is more satisfying than to work with talented young people." Images of Masur in action under such circumstances show him in his musical zeal almost ferociously glowering at the youngsters he pushes to the utmost of their abilities, but their own affectionate testimonials size him up as an exceptionally benevolent and beloved taskmaster. Masur has followed his New York Philharmonic tenure by taking over the leadership of Paris's Orchestre National de France.

This Berlin concert had especially auspicious sponsorship, from a Hamburg-based foundation with an unwieldy name, Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben (literally German Foundation Music-Life), in tandem with Germany's former Social Democrat Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, himself a pianist up to recording several years ago the Mozart concerto for three pianos and orchestra in the company of his friends Christoph Eschenbach and Justus Frantz. Schmidt's co-sponsorship of this tour, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the German National Foundation for the arts that Schmidt himself helped create, involved two poignant related overtones. During the final especially harrowing phase of World War II, he sought surcease from the horrors of the Allies' annihilating bombing raids on Berlin by devoting his evenings to organ lessons. More recently he has revealed that encroaching deafness has cruelly diminished his ability even to hear the music that has always meant so much to him.

This Berlin concert came as the penultimate stop on a tour that had begun in Hamburg's historic St. Michaelis Church on Aug. 25 and included a stop in Greifswald, concluding on Sept. 1 in Leipzig, a musical metropolis where many citizens virtually idolize Masur for having played a unique leading part in forestalling a blood-bath by the Soviet Army that had surrounded the city in Nov. 1989 during the touch-and-go days immediately preceding Germany's reunification.

The program Masur chose began with Alfred Schnittke's punnily entitled "(K)Ein Sommernachtstraum" -- and let's stop right here for a bit of clarification. Germans translate Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night" comedy as "Ein Sommernachtstraum," and Schnittke, in accord with his frequently whimsical wont, interpolated into it snippets from the familiar score by Mendelssohn. That single parenthesized letter at the start of his title turns it into "(No) Midsummer Night's Dream" -- explicable by its original scheduling for a program of works with Shakespearean connotations. Schnittke, born a Soviet citizen in 1934, had a personal connection to Germany's second city; he and his Russian wife Irina settled in Hamburg in 1990 and spent the remaining eight years of his life there, beset by one almost fatal stroke after another, but managing among other things to teach at Hamburg's Musikhochschule.

Two richly gifted young violinists, both of whom appeared on the sunny side of 30 -- Berlin's Viviane Hagner (playing a 300-year-old Strad lent her by a Japanese foundation) and Stuttgart's Tanja Becker-Bender -- followed the Schnittke with the Bach Double Concerto, and Masur concluded the evening with the meat-and-potatoes main course, a richly central European realization of Anton Bruckner's majestic Seventh Symphony. In the fairly recent past, Berlin's pampered, sophisticated audience has heard this glorious work as interpreted by Kent Nagano with his Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and by Daniel Barenboim with his touring Chicago Symphony; Masur's performance stood on its own excellence, benefiting from polyphonic exactness and notably careful phrasing, especially in the soulful Adagio movement.