Musikfest Berlin 1: The Big Bang

The conceptual frameworks and strands of inquiry that give structure to Musikfest Berlin – the annual festival of concerts organised by the Berliner Festspiele – vary from year to year; what remains constant is the guiding principle that twentieth and twenty-first century pieces can and should occupy the same programmes as the august masterworks of Mozart or Beethoven. Over the past several years this approach has resulted in countless concerts where the joy of hearing familiar works performed by world-class orchestras and soloists is paired with the thrill of new discoveries.

Yet even with the festival’s tendency toward adventurous programming, the decision to open proceedings with Wolfgang Rihm’s Tutuguri seemed especially bold. Both the duration and demands of the piece – in addition to a large orchestra, it calls for a sound engineer,…