Harmony and the Spheres

In Germany, the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s Disputatio is being celebrated in numerous and diverse ways, from the introduction of the Playmobil Martin Luther figure (I’m not making this up; it really exists), to countless performances of Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony, to a special one-off bank holiday at the end of October. For many choirs, a programme devoted to Bach would seem the most obvious way to mark the occasion, but the Rundfunkchor Berlin have gone several steps further: working in collaboration with Robert Wilson, they created an immersive experience somewhere near the midpoint of choral concert, musical theatre and performance piece. Luther: dancing with the gods, which ran for a week this October at the Pierre Boulez Saal, was an intriguing and often wonderful experiment; if it was not always able to locate…