Last concert of the 2023-2024 season, outdoors at the Waldbühne in Berlin. Click here for high-resolution version.
I’ve mentioned before how a subscription to the Berlin Philharmonic’s streaming service is such good medicine for the cultural isolation of the woods here in the Blue Ridge foothills. A few days ago I received a brochure for the season that begins on August 23. As usual, it’s brilliant programming. September 24 will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, so the orchestra will be doing six of Bruckner’s symphonies. Other symphonies include Charles Ives’ 4th, Brahms’ 4th, Haydn’s 44th and 54th, Dvořák’s 7th, Mozart’s 20th, Mahler’s 1st and 9th, Beethoven’s 6th, Schubert’s 8th and Tchaikovsky’s 5th. On June 14, Saint-Saëns’ organ symphony is on the program. If you’ve seen the movie Babe, then the organ symphony will be familiar. In the concerto category are piano (Shostakovich, Busoni, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Rachmaninov) as well as violin concertos and a cello concerto. Choral music includes a concert performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. John Williams will return to conduct his movie music! The final concert, outdoors at the Waldbühne, will be a Leonard Bernstein concert, including music from West Side Story.
You can download the program here.
A season subscription to the streaming service is not exactly cheap — €169, on sale until August 23 for €152.10. It is, however, some of the best-produced television I’ve ever seen. The video and audio are perfect. Even when recording under a shell at the Waldbühne, the quality of the video and audio are just as good. By the way, those outdoors concerts sell out. The Waldbühne, which can seat 22,000 people, is packed. This year’s end-of-season concert ended with a performance of Berlioz’s “Bolero,” a piece that we’re all familiar with but which I have never heard played quite so brilliantly. The camera zooms in on the faces of the musicians, as always. They kept throwing little smiles at each other, unaware, of course, that the camera caught it. Was it an inside joke of some sort? It’s impossible to know, but I suspect it’s just that they were having such a good time.
All the concerts can be streamed live. They usually start at 7 p.m. Berlin time. You can watch them live, of course. A couple of weeks after each concert, it’s added to the archive. The archive is included with subscriptions. The archive, some of which goes back for 60 years with more than 800 concerts, is an incredible resource.
These concerts are best watched on a big television screen, either with good headphones or a good sound system.