Into the thick of things...
Moving out of the concert hall with various series of presentations, the Rundfunkchor finds itself in the midst of the community
One night in February 2009, there is a long queue forming in front of the “Berghain” on an industrial wasteland behind Berlin’s East Station. The nightly gathering in this bunker-like disused heating plant is normally characterized by denizens of Berlin’s party scene and a techno beat. But on this occasion, the Yellow Lounge’s featured guest is Rundfunkchor Berlin. Pools of light drift across the concrete walls, as high as a church nave. DJ Canisius puts on classics with the bass turned up high: Philip Glass segues into Rimsky-Korsakov into Palestrina. Students, hip-hoppers and young creative types swarm round the bars, up and down the steel stairs and around the little stage. Appearing on the stage at 10.30 is Simon Halsey, who gives the downbeat for Lauridsen’s O magnum mysterium. The Rundfunkchor is spread throughout the whole space, including the midst of the audience. The industrial hall begins to vibrate. It feels like being inside a giant instrument. The hip audience, along with a sizeable contingent from the traditional Rundfunkchor public, listens in dead silence and breaks into an ovation after each number. “Many thanks for the cool concert experience last evening,” writes T.R., “25, student, new fan” and “especially that a two-time Grammy winner doesn’t mind appearing before such an audience – and at a price that a student budget can easily live with.” There could not be a more precise description of the Rundfunkchor’s goal for its series Broadening the Scope of Choral Music.
Normally a cappella choral concerts attract only a small, elite audience. Broadening provides additional attractions with the goal of expanding the appeal and accessibility of choral music to reach beyond classical audiences. For example, with Holst’s chamber opera Sāvitri. Sāvitri is the story of a woman who succeeds in conquering Death because she has seen through the veil of Māyā (the illusion of all existence). The early-20th-century English composer gave material form to intangible existence through a wordless female chorus. Gustav Holst learned Sanskrit in order to create his own libretto from an incident in the Mahābhārata, the Hindu epic. Lars Scheibner will stage Sāvitri with the Rundfunkchor in Berghain. “For me,” says Scheibner, there is a visual counterpart to this audible transcendence of existence: the contortionists. These artists go beyond the limits of normal physical flexibility. We will be attempting in our performance to expose a large audience to this music’s potential, to its beauty and intensity, by extending the auditory experience into something visual through staging the choral part with a whole new element. And bringing the music into to the midst of the audience will also surely help overcome the static goggle-box effect of traditional classical presentations.”
Related to the idea of Broadening is the scenic version of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion that Peter Sellars is preparing for the Salzburg Festival on the initiative of the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle. The American star director has collaborated once before with the Rundfunkchor in this constellation: on the semi-staged performances of John Adams’s opera The Flowering Tree for which he worked on the rhythm of the text syllable by syllable as well as on posture. That might not be noticeable to all at first glance, but it leads to a real increase in intensity. Sellars was clearly impressed that a professional ensemble like the Rundfunkchor “produced not a cold, well-drilled sound but rather that it radiated so much feeling and warmth”. Now the collaboration continues: by means of small interventions and additions that clarify and tension and topical relevance of a piece, thus speaking to a larger audience that may not be used to classical music.
Thinking outside the box of a professional international concert chorus’s core operations also means breaking down the boundaries of the Christian-Western musical tradition and opening oneself up to non-European cultures. As part of the roc series KlangKulturen, the Rundfunkchor has presented concerts with Turkish (2008) and Iranian (2009) musicians, each attended by hundreds of Turkish and Iranian listeners. The concerts left a deep impression and for some may well have represented a first encounter with the concert partner’s musical culture. In 2010 this series will continue with Korean musicians. And surely the Rundfunkchor will again receive many letters like T.R.’s.
Boris Kehrmann
The Rundfunkchor’s Broadening projects
2005: Rodion Shchedrin: The Sealed Angel (choreography: Lars Scheibner)
2006 – Christian Jost: Angst (world premiere; scenic installation: Gottfried Pilz)
2007 – Sir John Tavener: The Veil of the Temple (German premiere; scenic installation: Rogier Hardeman)
2008 – Ernst Pepping: Passionsbericht des Matthäus (documentary theatre: Werner Kroesinger)
2009 – Christian Jost: Angst (new production: Jasmina Hadziahmetovic)
2009 – James MacMillan: St. John Passion (German premiere; choreographic installation: Lars Scheibner)
2010 – Gustav Holst: Sāvitri (from the Mahābhārata; scenic presentation/choreography: Lars Scheibner)
2011 – Richard Strauss: A cappella works, promenade concert in the halls of Neues Museum Berlin
2012 – Johannes Brahms: A German Requiem (choreography: Sasha Waltz and Jochen Sander)
