In an enormous hangar at Tempelhof Airport, the Berlin Philharmonic is giving four performances of Stockhausen’s massive 1955-57 work Gruppen, for three orchestras, under the direction of Simon Rattle, Daniel Harding, and Michael Boder. Above, the score itself (hovering over Wannsee), together with an audio snippet (not of the passage shown, but of the electrifying sequence in which a set of chords goes spinning around the hall). Below, the orchestral
groups distributed left, right, and center in Hangar 2:
Before the first performance, a crowd gathered in the makeshift lobby for another of the Philharmonic’s educational projects with students from area schools, this one based on Gruppen:
Tempelhof, which has been in business since 1923, is a dying airport; flights will cease at the end of October. I took some pictures of this iconic complex in its last weeks of operation:
I was sad to read of the death of Mauricio Kagel, one of the most inventive and unpredictable of modern European composers. Tom Service has a tribute. Go to UbuWeb to watch Kagel’s mind-bending anti-tribute to Beethoven, Ludwig Van.