Musikfest Berlin Part 3: Premonitions and Refraction

Near the end of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony – written in the final decade of the nineteenth century and left incomplete when Bruckner died in 1896 – there is a terrifying scream from the orchestra, a sound far more disconsolate than anything that had previously appeared in his corpus of orchestral work. A similar mood of spiritual unease pervades much of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In tempus praesens, a concerto for violin and orchestra completed in 2007. The whole of the twentieth century separates these two dark works, but they complemented one another wonderfully in a gripping and often cathartic concert given by Gidon Kremer, Christian Thielemann and the Sächsische Staatskapelle as part of Musikfest Berlin. Even before a note of Ms Gubaidulina’s concerto had been played, it was clear from the disposition of the orchestra that this would be no…