Musikfest 1: The heart’s disquiet

With the end of every summer comes the beginning of a new concert season and, in Berlin, that transition is usually signalled by Musikfest, the three-week series of orchestral and chamber concerts organised by the Berliner Festspiele in collaboration with the Berlin Philharmonic. This year’s festival – which will feature appearances from most of the Berlin orchestras as well as guest performances by musicians and ensembles from around the world – opened with an unsurprisingly fine concert from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Iván Fischer, which paired the troubled idyll of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony with extracts from Jörg Widmann’s Das heiße Herz, an orchestral song cycle inspired by the same vein of German romantic verse that haunted so much of Mahler’s oeuvre.

For the texts of Das heiße Herz, a song cycle written initially for…