Opening Night: Contrasts

The beginning of the new concert season in Berlin follows a well-established script: sometime around the end of August, when the festivals are wrapping up and the summer holidays are nearing their end, the Berlin Philharmonic lays out its red carpet for what is often an evening of exceptional music. This year’s concert did not diverge outwardly from the formula and, indeed, the only clue that the evening marked the beginning of Sir Simon Rattle’s final season as the orchestra’s Chief Conductor lay in the programming: even by the standards of the Berlin Philharmonic, their monumentally-scaled performance of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung seemed an uncommonly grand way to open a season. The evening began, however, with the world première of a more compact work by Georg Friedrich Haas, the aptly titled ein kleines symphonisches Gedicht (bearing the…