I’ve been catching up with the blogs on my website, sadly neglected for over a year, but now back in action. In fact, I’ve neglected it for longer than that, considering I hadn’t posted anything about my foreign travels since 2015, when I went on two trips, to Italy https://wolfiewolfgang.com/it-was-all-mistake-my-three-inspiring/ and to Portugal https://wolfiewolfgang.com/my-time-in-lisbon-portugal-was-pure/

During my travels, I usually take my camera and, when armed with that, I am unstoppable. Looking through my photographs recently, I was worried that soon it would be too late to remember the details and, reluctantly, I would have to abandon ideas of writing about my experiences abroad.

So, to make it up with all those photographs lying dormant and ignored in my crazily crowded computer files, I decided a few weeks ago to do a blog-marathon and write these 17 blogs about my European travels over the the last 7 years – 7 years of real change in all our lives, here in the UK, and around the world.

Four failed UK prime ministers – plus another one soon.

There was Covid and Trump

Putin

Netanyahu

The world definitely changed and some of those changes were made only too apparent on my various journeys around Europe. I’m hoping that although things have got so bad, they can’t get much worse before, who knows, the bad guys are forced out, and the rest of the world will be pressured by the rest of humanity to make a real change for the better.

With apologies to all you disenfranchised UK citizens, and on a totally selfish note, there was at least some good news for me since 2017. I got my Irish citizenship and retained my EU passport.

If you want to look up my latest set of travel blogs, the links are below:

Amalfi Coast, Italy (2017): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/on-the-amalfi-coast/

Naples and Sorrento, Italy (2017) : https://wolfiewolfgang.com/category/travel/page/2/

Puglia: Polignano a mare, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-puglia-polignano-a-mare/

Puglia: Lecce, Bari and Trani, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/some-other-towns-my-journey-through-puglia-in-southern-italy/

Puglia: Alberobello to Matera, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/on-the-road-from-polignano-to-matera-via-alberobello/

Milan, Italy (2019): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/milan-city-of-fashion-music-and-art-even-in-the-rain/

Naples, Italy (2020): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/back-in-naples-weeks-before-covid-soon-we-were-all-told-to-stay-home/

Pompeii, Italy (2020): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/in-2020-i-went-to-pompeii-and-then-to-troy/

Tropea, Calabria, Italy (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/tropea-taking-it-easy-in-calabria/

Lahti, Finland (2022):https://wolfiewolfgang.com/flying-to-lahti-in-finland-for-sibelius/

Helsinki, Finland (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/a-week-in-helsinki/

Ainola, Finland (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/a-week-in-helsinki/

Tallinn, Estonia (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/day-trip-to-tallinn-in-estonia/

Leipzig, Germany (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/an-easter-meeting-in-leipzig-with-js-bach-300-years-on/

Berlin, Germany (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/im-a-berliner-now/

Sysmä, Finland: (2023) https://wolfiewolfgang.com/away-from-it-all-at-the-centre-of-all-things-in-rural-finland/

Lahti, Finland, (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/back-to-lahti-in-september-2023/

The post I’ve caught up with blogging about the last seven years of my European adventures. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

It was like coming home when I looked out of the window of the apartment in Lahti, just as it felt like leaving home when I said goodbye to the cottage in Virtaa, near the little town of Sysmä, after a week’s break in Finnish rural paradise (see previous blog https://wolfiewolfgang.com/away-from-it-all-at-the-centre-of-all-things-in-rural-finland/). I’m a bit like that, I’m afraid. Like the old song, home is where you hang your hat. I’m exaggerating, of course, I have hung my hat in a number of places that I hope I will never have to see again. That was definitely not true of Finland when I went there in September 2023, my second visit. In 2022 I came here for the first time because of the Lahti Sibelius Festival and love it so much, I just had to come again – and again, I will be coming back this year, 2024.

The same apartment, of course, why change things when they work so well. So, yes, it was like coming home to return here to Lahti in southern Finland for another Sibelius festival. September in Finland is a bit like September in the UK – maybe a couple of degrees cooler, but definitely not cold.

I was staying in the modern and wonderfully efficient apartment block complete with sauna, a lift, and excellent sound-proofing. It was a great place to wake up in and, it was even better after a mug of coffee.

I was in the middle of town and Lahti is a small compact kind of town, well it’s a small city, so everything, including the beautiful lake-side Sibelius Hall was within easy walking distance. I have always thought I was a small-town boy, and it is true that I like the feel of being in a town with all the convenience of urban living but where everywhere soon becomes familiar and, yes, homely. I live in just such a town in the UK.

So, I felt perfectly at home and comfortable here – even my socks matched the decor.

I have to confess that I remembered the way the blinds sent a dotted reflection of the sunlight onto the wall above the bed. I thought when I first came here that even the light is design-conscious in this country. I say that I have to confess this because it gives me away, I get great pleasure from the way light falls on walls. It is even better when it plays the same trick a year later.

Another routine that never changes is doing my morning martial arts practice. I was back doing it here in the same recreational space behind the apartments as last year, and it felt as if it had already been consecrated as my dojo. Even better, it was still warm enough in the September sun to wear shorts.

Turn left for the Sibelius Hall and turn right for the city centre – whichever way you go, the streets are lined with green, that particular leaf shade that seems to say enjoy us because this is the beginning of our last shout before autumn.

I turned right because it was time for a leisurely, holiday-mood, second cup of coffee and there are excellent coffee houses, cafés and restaurants here in Lahti, and I had the time to linger.

Statue of two Finnish cavalry soldiers, Hakkapeliitta, from the 30-Year War. by Pentti Papinaho (1974) – those horses look as if they could have won the war on their own.

The Lutheran Church of the Cross (Ristinkirkko) (1978) looks different from each side you look at it, but whichever, it dominates the skyline and shows off the brilliance of its architect, Alvar Aalto (1898 – 1976), who was a brilliant architect in a country of brilliant architects.

The brilliantly white interior comes as a dramatic surprise, but it is both in the spirit of ecclesiastical design, but also of the Modernist Finnish delight in clean lines. The acoustics are clean and clear enough in here for the church to be a concert venue and a music recording studio too for the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. The magnificent, 53-stop, organ was designed by Veikko Virtanen in 1979, and it is so impressive that it has inspired the annual Lahti International Organ Festival.

Spirit of Freedom (Vapauden Hengetäir) 1952 by Wäinö Aaltonen (1894 – 1966)

Down the grassy slope, and/or the many steps, from the church, in a former brewery building, is Lahti’s new, 2022, visual arts gallery MALVA, which on both of my visits here, put on stimulating and forward- looking exhibitions.

In 2022, they were showing a series of shows by the French artists, Adrien M & Claire B – Claire Bardainne (b. 1978) and Adrien Mondot (b. 1979) – with the collective title Havens of Light, which in their description was digital art and the blending of the imaginary, real and virtual dimensions. It was also billed as being interactive….so much so that it even got me to dance for the distortion mirrors.

Their other project was called Crossing the Mirror – a pop-up book in augmented reality and it’s best explained by this short video.

Even the café space joined in the gallery’s art displays with this reproduction of a sixties living room.

Salpausselkä ski stadium, remodelled in 1972, is a weirdly alien object seen from all around Lahti. I thought it was an abandoned road bridge when I first saw it, but then, skiing is not something I have ever done or ever would. Except maybe, if I wanted to commit an elaborate attempt at suicide. Even going to the top of that ski jump would give me heart failure. I am still impressed by the fact that anyone can ski, let alone do the kind of olympic class ski jumping that goes on here in winter. I’m envious because I know I would love to do it, but would never be able to.

If you live in Finland, you have to be tough and you need to be pretty athletic too, especially in the long winters. In front of the ski slope is a sports complex that caters for most sports enthusiasts, including, of course, a football stadium for Lahti FC, a team that has its ups and downs, I’m told, but it is currently in the Finnish Premier League.

Lahti FC produced the player, Jari Litmanen (b. 1971), who is generally regarded as the greatest Finnish footballer ever. His statue ( by Reijo Huttu, 2010) at the club, and celebrates Finland’s all-time leading scorer, its national team captain who also played for Ajax, Barcelona, Liverpool, Malmö as well as Lahti FC. Known as Kuningas (the King) he is an inspiration to all young Finnish footballer wannabes.

The statue may not be great art but it certainly makes its point. As an art-work, I preferred this nearby kiosk with its equally energetic graffiti.

I guess if you have a sporting yearn but you can’t run or ski or kick a ball, you can always be like these. two enthusiastic anglers in the park that leads to the harbour, and then on to Sibelius Hall.

I paid a second visit too to the sculpture park in the woods next to the park to see the colossal concrete sculptures of Olavi Lanu (1925 – 2015) (see my earlier blog) https://wolfiewolfgang.com/flying-to-lahti-in-finland-for-sibelius/

And then, as on every evening during my stay, my destination was the Sibelius Festival at the wonderful Sibeliustalo, Sibelius Hall, built in 2000 over-looking Lake Vesijärvi, and with one of the best acoustics in any concert hall I have visited.

I was here in 2022, https://wolfiewolfgang.com/flying-to-lahti-in-finland-for-sibelius/I returned in 2023 and I plan to go to the 2024 festival too when they will be performing, in their 25th anniversary concerts, all seven of Sibelius’ symphonies. I can’t wait, as they say.

Dalia Stasevska, the festival director and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s principal conductor is seen here at the end of the performance of Sibelius Symphony No. 7 during the last concert of the 2023 festival, one of the many highlights of last year’s event.

Another highlight was the Spanish violinist Maria Dueñas as the soloist in Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, with Festival guests, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra with conductor Daniel Harding. I am already booked to return and, honesty, I am already excited about it.

Let’s finish with a short video made at a recording session in the Sibelius Hall in 2014 with Okko Kamu conducting the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7.

The post Back to Lahti in September 2023 appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

It is early September in 2023, I am sitting in a rocking chair in a cottage, a converted 19th century log house, in a little village called Virtaa, 7.7 kilometres from a small town called Sysmä. The cottage is in the grounds of an old manor house, Virtaan Kartano, owned by Juhani and Tiina Stjernvall. It is a working farm for Juhani and Tiina, but for me, left to my own devices, just here to find peace in the magnificent vastness of the Finnish countryside, it was an oasis – one haunted by the voice of Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957), whose music, at the annual Sibelius Festival in Lahti, first brought me to this hypnotic country. I spent a week here, before doing south to Lahti for the annual Sibelius Festival and, during most of that time, a piece of Sibelius’ music kept up its persistent call.

Tapiola (1926) is a one movement tone poem for orchestra, loosely about Tapio, the spirit of the forest as found in Finland’s epic creation poem, Kalevala. Sibelius wasn’t usually cooperative about the ‘meaning’ of his work, but his publisher asked him to explain the legend behind Tapiola, and then converted the composer’s reluctant reply into a poem:

Wide-spread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests,
Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;
Within them dwells the Forest’s mighty God,
And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.

If there is a mighty god in Sibelius’s tone poem, it is an ambiguous one, it probably is more brooding dream than god, but, believe me, if you go walking in Finland’s forests, you will feel the presence of Tapio. I did.

Virtaan Kartano, the farm, is in a typical Finnish landscape of forest and lakes, with the River Tainionvirta leading to Lake Päijänne. This was the first week in September and, therefore, the beginning of the end of the summer season, maybe a few weeks earlier there would have been more people around. The god Tapio may have scared them away, making the place a silent haven – just for me. I doubt it, but that is how if felt. I was under his spell, and could only have left my rocking chair for another chair outside on the porch to sit there all day looking and not looking at the fields and the trees beyond them, and wondering what forces really hide in these forests.

I did move back inside later to have a sauna, the Finnish way, eat some food from Sysmä’s supermarket – like a farmers’ market in terms of quality. A glass of wine and then I’d read some of the Kalevala on my Kindle – then it was back to watching and listening on the next day, and so on.

Juhani, drove past a couple of times on his tractor, and our conversations flowed in an impressively economic Finnish use of friendly monosyllables. Mostly he was occupied in another part of the forest,.

The splendid cockerel and his harem of hens, were a constant clucking murmur, heard like a day-time lullaby from across the yard…

…and of course, there was always an alarm call in the morning.

There were eggs too – warm from the hens, a present from them, via Juhani, for the breakfast table.

From the Sysmä supermarket there was reindeer cheese. It was delicious on hot toast. I didn’t see any reindeer, but knew they were out there somewhere, probably further North, and I send them my thanks.

In case you are wondering, and I didn’t know this, female reindeer, like the males, have antlers, but they keep them through the winter, unlike the males. Don’t ask about Father Christmas’ Rudolph, he is probably a she.

Virtaan Kartano is a wonderful place and, if you want to find out more, here is the link: https://www.virtaankartano.fi/en

There was no problem finding somewhere for my morning martial arts practice here. This must be one of the most tranquil dojos I have ever had for my Chinese-style White Crane Kung-fu. The style I try to learn has moves inspired by the movements of the white cranes still common in China.

I was in the middle of the tai-chi move called the golden cockerel stands on one leg, when an extraordinary sound came from behind me. It wasn’t a Chinese white crane, but a group of Common Cranes, the first I had seen in the wild.

I had never heard their calls before, and I had no idea they could be so loud. I know they can be found in other countries too, but those Finnish cranes were thrilling when they came flying over the forest calling out like instruments in a Sibelius symphony before landing in the field behind me.

This is the land of forests and lakes, a tenth of Finland’s land area is covered by water, and 73.9%, or 66%, but definitely a lot more than half of the land is forested. It really is one of the biggest rural spaces in Europe.

The river here, River Tainionvirta, is rich in salmon, and the furthest river south in Finland for salmon fishing. It was also a bathing spot for the inhabitants of my log cabin.

It wasn’t hot in there, but I’m sure it get a lot colder when the snows arrive. I suspect you can’t have the full experience of Finland without going in for some wild swimming, even better if there is a sauna nearby. It was my first time swimming in a Finnish river, to the fish seemed as interested in watching me as I was watching them. When I say fish, I mean big fish. Honestly. As big as this.

The main activity for me in this inspiring place was just to go walking, breathing in the clean air, listening for crane calls, and watching the occasional jumping fish. I took a lot of photographs and was pleased I had packed my old Canon EOS. For much of each day, I was the typical one man and his camera. Here are some of my shots. They are not exaggerating when they say Finland is the land of forests and lakes.

After a week in this spiritually uplifting place, I could genuinely salute the sun in gratitude every morning before starting my tai-chi, feeling that I had grounded myself here in Finland, set down some roots, literally under my feet, but also, if I dare say this, I felt that I had put down roots into my soul here too. It might have been Tapio, the Finnish god of the forests, he was there in the low-lying sun, it might have been Sibelius, he was always playing in my head, but I think coming here, I was simply opened up to spirit of the Nordic world that opens for us if we imbue its spirit in silence.

Here is Sibelius’ tone poem, played by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, a worthy addition to the cannon of his seven completed symphonies, and a major consolation for the absence of his destroyed eighth symphony. The opening phrase that encircles the whole piece, one way or another, haunted me during my wanderings through the Finnish countryside – and it still does. It is possibly describing what you might find in the forest if you are bold enough to go there. I felt I was getting a glimpse out there of the ‘silence’ of the natural world in the sense that Sibelius meant in his long search to empty classical music down, or, more properly, up, to its profound and ideal of union with that silence. In this music there is beauty, but also fear, and a sense of the inexplicable intercommunication between us as individuals and the great mysteries of the other. It is almost enough to frighten us so much that we daren’t walk into that forest. I’m glad that I did.

The post Away from it all at the centre of all things in rural Finland. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after Germany’s reunification and the city was still like a building construction site. Then it was possible to travel from the former Western Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate to the former East and see the immediate change from glitz to drab. This was all in the process of change. Twenty-five years ago, I was working on the English language dub of a film with my German colleague and friend from EuroArts, Bernd Hellthaler and the Hungarian film director, István Szabó. I was staying in a small hotel on the well-known and poetically-named street Unter den Linden (under the linden trees) that runs straight, East to West, through the centre of Berlin. I had the opportunity at that time to discuss, with these two intelligent, liberal-minded, and much more informed people than me, what was going to happen in Germany after the great change. Their mood was of cautious optimism. In 2023, I was interested to see how Berlin must have changed in those twenty-five years.

This time, I was happy to get an unexpected message from Bernd soon after my arrival in Berlin, and, as well as being pleased to see that he is still the same charming guy, and a key figure in music broadcasting, even though he has now retired, he is also still very much the pragmatist who answers political questions with his characteristic shrug. We had a convivial and still largely optimistic meeting with coffee and kuchen, but these days conversations about East and West are dominated by talk of Russia and Ukraine, but not without an opportunity grabbed to rib me about the UK’s unpopular decision over Brexit. I was happy this time to be able to wave my new Irish passport showing that I’m still very much in the EU.

I was staying here in ‘quirky,’ ‘arty,’ ‘gritty,’ ‘edgy,’ or just plain ‘trendy, Kreuzberg, a student quarter, south of the city centre, Mitte, in a ‘trendy’ and ‘arty’ apartment, next to a very cool bar on one side and a hipster restaurant on the other, with more down the street on both sides and Babylon Kino, an arthouse cinema at one end, in a district that has almost wall-to-wall graffiti.

Very soon, this bar became a kind of home – a place to go if you wanted to go out somewhere interesting but couldn’t be bothered to go far. Next-door was often far enough for me, especially when it was as pretty as this place.

It became the rendez-vous of choice when meeting up with family and friends, who also happened to be in Berlin, before moving on a few yards up the street for dinner. Max & Moritz was a really classy but informal ‘German’ restaurant, serving authentic, no really, German food.

And then, when it was time for bed, I only needed to stagger a few steps and I was there,

With the blinds open, I used to wake up in the morning to a leafy inner-courtyard view and, if I was lucky, a sighting or two of the local red squirrels, who might have been watching me.

Every morning, rain or no rain, I headed to the end of the street to a small square called Oranienplatz, an open space in this area of dense housing.

Oranienplatz supplied me with a gritty, in the literal sense, square for my martial arts practice…and so, yet again, I had found an ideal Kung-fu and tai-chi dojo. My audience, most mornings, was a trio of elderly Turkish women. One of them, on my last day, did a funny and unexpected imitation of my upper crane block.

If Kreuzberg is ‘edgy,’ it only seemed like that a couple of times at the entrance to the Kottbusser Tor metro station, when it was probably wise not to pay too much attention to the furtive huddles of young men rolling small polythene bags into silver foil. If we are talking about crime in Kreuzberg, the statistics tell us that serious crime is minimal here, with at worst, some drug peddling and drunken behaviour. I was careful, but not fearful in this vibrant part of the city.

Kottbusser Tor station was the quickest way to get into the city centre, so I went there a lot, excited, the first time, to be on my way to Berlin Alexanderplatz, the location of one of my favourite books. Alfred Döblin’s montage-style 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. It is the story of Franz, an ex-con who is drawn back to crime in the working class districts around the famous Berlin square, in the closing days of the Weimar Republic and the beginnings of the rise of Nazism.

The novel was made into a masterly and, yes, unforgettable tv series in 1980 (now remastered) by film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Here is a short trailer for the remastered videos, sorry, but I could only find the version with French subtitles. It is still one of my very favourite TV series – all these years later.

When my train got into Alexanderplatz station, I knew that it would be a totally different experience to the novel, the series, and even the historical Alexanderplatz, which was destroyed by bombing in World War 2.

The station is beautiful – colourful, bright and clean…

…and up on street level, it has gained in shopping mall convenience what it has lost of its, yes, ‘edgy’ reputation. And, I forgot to tell you, it rained a lot during most of my stay. Apparently, it really can rain in Berlin.

Nothing, though, can rob me of my inner image of Alexanderplatz, even if, I have to admit, I am more that a little bit disappointed by its rebuild.

These days Alexanderplatz mostly exists indoors, like here in the giant Galeria Kaufhof – but if nothing else, it makes a welcome refuge from the rain.

I was a brave and often rather a damp sight-seer around Berlin city centre, but that didn’t stop me appreciating the mammoth changes that have happened since I was last here twenty-five years ago. I had often wondered how the city would handle its reconstruction, or maybe I should say series of reconstructions, since the long tale of the war and its consequences took its toll on what was once a handsome city with a long history of welcoming people from other countries and cultures.

I was intrigued to see what the new architects had been doing to replace the shattered centre of Berlin – there are some wonderful new buildings by innovative architects, but not maybe, in the very middle of town, the so-called Island of Museums, where they have gone for rebuilding replicas of the originals. It was a marathon job, of course, and one to admire, but, I couldn’t help feeling that the soul of those buildings has been lost in the replications. It is not really for me to say, but I would have liked to have seen a new cathedral built here instead of the monumental duplicate that they built in its place.

I love a lot of the new buildings and admire the way Berlin, and Germany in general, has become a modern culture not afraid to recognise its past, even the most distressing aspects of it. The well-known British comedy series, Fawlty Towers, had a running gag where the Brits are repeatedly told ‘don’t mention the war’. I never felt that I had to pretend when I was in Berlin. I was especially impressed by the number of open spaces, bomb sites, that instead of being simply built over to make a white-washed new city centre, a few prime sites, where the Wehrmacht had its centre, have been left either untouched or dedicated to a grieving and dignified form of remembrance as in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermodeten Juden Europas), designed by Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold (2005) where 4.7 acres of valuable real estate in the centre of Berlin has been covered in a maze of 2,711 concrete slabs with an underground Ort der Information (Place of Information) that holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims.

Not far from there is a small inner city carpark which is the unmarked site of Hitler’s bunker, and not much further away, one of the last Nazi era constructions, once the largest office building in Europe, built in 1936, as the headquarters of the Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, then the House of Ministries during the Democratic Republic and now, bizarrely, it is the headquarters of the German Finance Ministry.

Running along the side of the indestructible building, are some of the remains of the Berlin Wall, now a memorial too, for all those who died trying to cross it into West Germany during the DDR, or GDR (German Democratic Republic). The derelict land in front of the wall, still a kind of No-Man’s Land, it is, I was told, the site of the Gestapo and SS Headquarters. It seems that the land, like the Biblical Potter’s Field is just too contaminated to have any use other than one for mourning the dead.

Thinking about the Berlin Wall and the days of East Germany, the DDR, I visited the DDR Museum, a brilliantly designed and curated record of what ordinary life would have been like during that era. Sure, the repression and autocracy is there, some dreams too, but it is also a museum to a world which was temptingly so much less materialistic than ours is today.

Life for that mystical tribe known as ‘ordinary people’ had its ambitions restricted, certainly, but looking round the museum, I couldn’t help feeling that those who didn’t become victims of the Stasi, were freed from the negative effects of too many choices – what kind of deodorant, washing powder, or kitchen units? Does it really matter? I thought. Maybe they had something there.

Then, of course, there was the dead hand and chilly smile of autocratic bureaucracy, and my mild envy for those people disappeared like a short-lived daydream.

A strong desire for the new in 1968 is unsurprising. In those years, the new often meant building on bomb sites. Berlin had been given, not as a gift, a rubble-covered tabula rasa for building on. The Neue Nationalgalerie building was one of those masterpieces, designed by the famous Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a vast ground floor exhibition space with a lower floor for the permanent collection (Picasso, Munch, Mondriaan and Calder among others). It was closed for six years in 2015 because the design led to many technical problems, especially cracking glass and condensation. The British architect, David Chipperfield, undertook the major renovation and the gallery was opened again in 2021.

The main new exhibition here on my visit was the series Birkenau (2014) by the German artist Gerhard Richter. The works are based on four photographs taken in the concentration camp that Richter has gradually transposed with charcoal and oil paint until they became abstracts with the original drawings invisible. They are positioned in front of four matching mirrors that add to their own level of transposition. Other parts of the exhibition show over-painted photographs in Richter’s long exploration of how to represent the Holocaust in art.

Another brave new 1960’s building in Berlin is the Philharmonie, opened in 1963, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Beethovens 9th Symphony, the Choral – a hot ticket, I should imagine. The old Philharmonie building was destroyed by British bombs in World War 2, but there can be few complains about its wonderful replacement. The Berlin Philharmonic were away on tour when I was in Berlin, but I managed to get tickets for a concert at the Philharmonie with Berlin’s other world-class orchestra, the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin (the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra), with their principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski. They were playing Shostakovich’s excitingly modern Symphony No. 4 in a performance that is still playing in my head over a year later.

Before the symphony, there was the German premiere of a new work by the Russian composer Elena Firsova. Her Piano Concerto for the pianist Yefim Bronfman, is, she says ‘very personal and reflected my meditations about the mystery and meaning of Death.’ She quotes a phrase from Beethoven’s late String Quartet op. 135, over which Beethoven had written: ‘Muss es sein?’ (Does it have to be?). Born in St Petersburg and a student in Moscow, Elena Firsova now lives in London, but before she left Russia, she, like Shostakovich, was condemned by the authorities for her modernist tendencies. The Congress of the Composers’ Union in 1979 attacked her and two other composers of her generation: ‘Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov (her late husband) and Sofia Gubaidulina compose pointless and noisy mud…..they should be denied the right to represent Soviet music abroad.’

We were not denied the chance to hear this thought-provoking new work with its very human struggle for meaning in life and, also, maybe death. I don’t think Stalin would have liked it, but Beethoven, and I think, Shostakovich would have approved.

Unsurprisingly she is dismayed by the war against Ukraine; it ‘fills me with deep shame, I count myself lucky I left Russia thirty years ago and was last there seventeen years ago.’

Here is a video taken at that performance of the Firsova Piano Concerto in Berlin on 18 April 2023

Shostakovich’s fourth symphony was composed in 1935/6 and has had a dramatic history as it is the last work that Shostakovich wrote unfettered by the rules imposed on creative artists during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union. Pravda, the official newspaper was instructed by Stalin to write a critique which was a barely veiled personal attack on Shostakovich, who was at that time the brilliant enfant terrible among Soviet composers. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsenisk, which shared a lot of musical material with the fourth symphony, was called ‘muddle instead of music.’ Rehearsals had started for the premiere when it was announced that Shostakovich had withdrawn the work – probably to save the orchestra from Stalin’s wrath – and the symphony wasn’t premiered until 1961, long after Stalin’s death. Something died in Shostakovich after this….the fiery and dangerously challenging part of his creative genius was at least partially paralysed if not killed outright. He certainly never wrote anything like this symphony again.

At the Philharmonie last April it was definitely music instead of muddle – we heard the voice of a radical young man shouting out loud for his freedom from oppression. Berlin felt like the right place to hear him, having walked round the remains of Hitler’s Reich and the last remains of Berlin’s Soviet wall.

I looked to see if there was a recording of that performance but couldn’t find anything, so here is a short except of it played by the Berlin Philharmonic, in the same hall, conducted by Simon Rattle.

The Old National Gallery (Alte Nationalgalerie) sits in a prime spot on Berlin’s Museum Island and I could have spent my whole holiday here. It was founded to exhibit the works of major German artists, but later it was expanded to include many major 19th century French and Dutch artists….worth a visit in itself. You can see Cezanne, Corot, Courbet, Daubigny, Daumier, Fantin-Latour, Jongkind, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Rodin, Signat and Van Gogh. I shall ignore them, love them as I do, for the purposes of this blog, because a lot the German artists were new to me and I want to share them. I have long admired Friedrich, Böcklin, Klinger and Beckmann, but the others mentioned here, and many more, changed my perspective about German art in the 19th century, so dominated, for me at least, by the great French schools of Romanticism, Neo-Classicism, Realism, Impressionism and Expressionism.

And then I came to the pictures of King Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712 – 1786), painted with a propagandist brush by Adolph Menzel in his days as a history painter. Frederick was the sensitive and artistic son of an autocratic father, Frederick William I, the ‘Soldier King.’ Frederick, the unlikely heir, was first admired, or sneered at, for his interest in music and philosophy who, later in life, became interested in armies and soldiers and consequently, war. He modernised Prussian bureaucracy, reformed the justice system, and favoured the freedom of the press. Here in Menzel’s picture, he is seen as Old Fritz (der Alter Fritz), friend of the poor, who is going to be way-laid by a poor couple about to present him with a petition.

He was all of those things, but we would be getting him wrong if we really beleive he was a man of the people, an honest Joe. He was, for all his liberal ideas, a firm believer in Enlightened Absolutism and, whatever else he thought he was, he was certain that he was the number one guy in the country – the first servant of the state.

Is was tough being the lord of all you survey, so, I suppose it was understandable that sensitive and artistic Frederick, needed a beautiful summer palace to escape to when he needed some rest and refreshment. I had a long-held wish to see the place, romantically named Sanssouci (without worry) his version of Dun Roamin’, a kind of mini-Versailles, where, like Northern France, some of the gilt feels a bit washed out by the rain.

He was, as far as I know, happy here. He made the place just as he liked it….a bit camp, gilded and glittering, but also small in terms of other palaces, private too and, in his inner sanctum, simple and unpretentious.

The glitz was mostly reserved for the main reception rooms like this, his music room, where JS Bach’s son C P E Bach, played for him on the harpsichord and also accompanied the musical king’s flute. It was at Frederick’s other palace, the one at Potsdam, (bombed and destroyed during World War 2), that he persuaded CPE Bach to bring his father, Johann Sebastian along to play for him. The result, now famous, was that JS improvised multiple fugues on a tune composed by Frederick and later elaborated them further into what became A Musical Offering ( Das Musikalische Opfer, BWV 1079), one of the composers late and greatest masterpieces.

I suspect Frederick the Great was happiest though, later in his reign, to be alone in his study, reading, writing and practising his flute, and, from time-to-time, gazing out of the window at his favourite statue, placed there perfectly framed by his window.

It was here, in his armchair, in his seventies, crippled by asthma and gout, that he died in 1786, leaving instructions to be buried at Sanssouci next to his beloved greyhounds.

Unlikely but apt, somehow, I thought when I came across this framed screen-print of the old king, by Andy Warhol (1968). Weary, paranoid, camped up, and slightly ridiculous, the old man seems weighed down by monarchy and the impossibilities of finding happiness as an enlightened absolutist, or even here, sans souci – without worry. I’m sorry about all those wars, about the Partition of Poland, and for Frederick’s cruel treatment by his father, who had Frederick’s closest, and much loved, male friend beheaded in front of him after they’d tried to run away together. But, if for nothing else, I’m happy that Frederick invited Johann Sebastian Bach – the main reason for my trip to Germany – to come to Potsdam and to write one last masterpiece.

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After yesterday’s blog about Death In Venice with all that solemn music, I thought I’d leave you with something a bit racier for the weekend. No one, in the musical world, was racier than Frenchman, Emmanuel Chabrier (1841 – 1894) who was not just very clever, a man of taste and a great composer but he was also a lot of fun – maybe he had too much fun in fact because he came too a sticky end dying unpleasantly of syphilis at the relatively early age of 54 (stop all this death stuff, it’s the weekend). He is one of classical music’s great losses because he was only able to become a full-time composer for the last 14 years of his life and he had a lot of ideas to give to the world of music. You can hear his influence in many of the composers who followed him, especially Ravel and Stravinsky who were both admirers.

Enough of the gloomy and serious stuff – let’s go to the beach.

A Spanish beach in fact – Emmanuel Chabrier had a five month Spanish holiday in 1882,  and, in 1883, my current year of study, he wrote a piece about it. It has become one of the great orchestral showpieces, España, rhapsody for orchestra, and it shows, I like to think, that Emmanuel had a really good time there. He wrote about the attractive women in their bathing costumes and how he noticed that their buttons were not very securely fastened. Tut-tut, he even thought it would be a good idea on his next Spanish holiday, if he took some needles and cotton so that he could help out those Spanish ladies who were coming a bit apart at the seams. Things are a very different on Spanish beaches these days and I think Emmanuel would have enjoyed the views even more than he did in 1882. There is certainly much more to see these days.

Anyway, in January, here in the Northern hemisphere, our minds turn to holidays in the sun and all the uninhibited fun we’d like to have on the beach. Well, don’t we? A good alternative is to listen to Chabrier’s exhilarating piece and I know no better recording than this one, John Eliot Gardiner conducting The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in truly exciting style.

Here it is – I hope it puts a swagger in your step this weekend and encourages you to have some fun:

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My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

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