Musical encounters with the Berlin Phil

On New Year's Eve I took myself to the cinema for a "new to me" experience, the live transmission of a concert, the Berlin Philharmonic's new year concert - transmitted simultaneously to cinemas in many parts of the world. It turns out that the orchestra has a resident poet, who introduced the proceedings, recited his new year's poem in German and English, and during the piano-moving entertained us with a great chunk of Edith Sitwell's words to William Walton's Facade, quite amazing but not really translatable into German - though he provided an impression of its nonsensicality. As a sort of linguistic mirror-act, introducing the Dvorak pieces he launched into a Bohemian accent such as Dvorak might have spoken in (I was chuffed that my German was good enough to follow it) AND then did a comparable distortion in English translation, really quite unexpected and amazing,

On his retirement from the horn section, the orchestra made Klaus Wallendorf its "one and only resident poet for life". The ceremonial presentation can be seen here, and at the end of that clip is one of his concoctions, a song that contains the names of 19 Tokyo subway stations, written after an evening of Japanese hospitality. (See the youtube version here.)

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The horn players got quite a look in - another, Sarah Willis, interviewed the pianist (Daniil Trifonov) before the concert. It being new year, and Berlin, they ended the interview by having a glass of champagne and eating ... doughnuts!


Was it Sarah Willis, then, who organised and encouraged the Gartenschlauchorchester that we saw at the Berlin Phil's open day in June 2015? By gum, it was - she's on the left -

If you'd like to watch the live transmissions of the orchestra's concerts in the comfort of your own home, a year's subscription to the digital concert hall costs 149 Euros - a saving not only in ticket prices, but in the tedium of having to travel to the concert venue. That covers more than 40 live concerts (in HD) every season. Bargain! And if it's inconvenient to watch live, you can watch from the archive. (My father would have loved this - he had a huge collection of music DVDs and Blue Ray disks - and that, rather than tv, was the entertainment of an evening. My mother, less so ... she did a lot of knitting...)

The orchestra's website is worth a visit, eg for the (short) trailers of the movies,  for the many (longer) interviews with musicians, and for the history of the concert hall.

And if horns are right up your street, the "Ho, Ho, Horn" Christmas concert can be seen online, free - https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/23819

While at that open day in June 2015, we were lucky enough to hear the orchestra, for free - though getting a seat was a bit of a scrum, ganz unordentlich, rather un-German. We sat in the balcony on the right... happy memories ...

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Neues Museum - some ancient objects

Just as New College, Oxford, is one of the oldest colleges there, the Neues Museum dates back a fair ways. And it houses some of the oldest things - Egyptian art and Schliemann's discoveries in the search for ancient Troy.

We had an hour and a half to see "everything" - of course we didn't get to all the rooms; some things along the way caught our attention and called for label reading and discussion. I do hope we can go back sometime and look more carefully - the objects are wonderful. 

I filled another eight pages of my sketchbook, but very sketchily - the drawing was a means of looking intently, in the time available. As with this jar -

"Inscribed jar for 73 bags of sundried figs for a person named Huy.
18th dynasty, c.1340BC"

Had I not been drawing, and then checking the label, I wouldn't have seen the scratchy writing - small and faint behind glass.

Caught in passing - but what is it?
(Silly to take a photo, yet not bother to find out!)

Guestbook of Egyptologist Richard Lepsius, 1844

False door, 18th dynasty - about a metre high

5th dynasty, 2430BC (lovely animals; click on photo to enlarge)

Amphora with burned bone, late 1st-early2nd century, Trier,
and two face urns

Quickly captured

"Nordic antiquities" - house urn, 7th century BC;
135 house urns are known today

The ring vessels were used for ritual libations honouring gods or famous heroes

Some Trojan gold - dazzling

Men with conical hats, Cyprus, 6th century BC

The museum also has the famous bust of Nefertiti - photos not allowed!

Neues Museum - the floors

Built in 1849 and bombed in WW2, the Neues Museum lay derelict until David Chipperfield Architects revived it, leaving some of the old decoration; it reopened in 2009.

Wow. The combination of antiquity and modernity works for me.

My photos are hasty; we visited late-afternoon of our final day in Berlin. Much better photos are here and here - as well as a lot of written information.

I would have liked to spend longer photographing feet-on-floors - wonderful tiling!

Drawing Tuesday - Mezoamerica in Berlin ethnology museum

Having rushed through the Mesoamerica room several times on previous visits to the ethnology museum, I thought it might be a good idea to sit a while and draw. 

With just over two hours available, and many pages yet to fill in the sketchbook, I resolved to "draw like the wind" (in hindsight, perhaps not the best decision!). None, or very few, of the objects had their own labels, which helped in one way and was utterly frustrating in another - reading the labels wasn't a distraction, but the lack of all but general information (in German only) leaves you with very little sense of where the individual objects come from, when they were made, how they were used.

Some sort of hedgehog?

Not a hedgehog at all - the back of the figure on the right

And this is the other side of the figure on the left

The "hedgehog" drawn in compressed charcoal transferred to the other page,
marking out the shape of the front of the object

The little guy carrying a water jug on his back is also wearing a large mask.
The holes suggest it's an ocarina

Phytomorphic (pumpkin?) jar - gadrooned shape and pondrous handle

Still using compressed charcoal

Forgot to photograph the water jug with the bulbous legs ...

... and also these two small figures

So many bulgy bits!

Using pencil ... quite tentatively on the right, feeling the form

Lovely animals, especially the sleeping fox

Didn't draw these - they were brought together as examples of the four stages of Teotihuacan culture

Putting two and two together - empty chest, and the shackles - an image of a sacrificial victim?

Definitely too little time spent on these

Representation of a temple?

Wonderful plumed head-dress

Loved the look of these

Another "missing middle" - deliberate, or accidental breakage?

When I started drawing, the carving was a mass of unidentifiable lines and shapes,
but during the drawing it revealed itself

"Eagle feeding on a heart" (it's better to read the captions after you've done the drawing)

Another melon jar, and a painted bowl 

Final drawings of the session, not particularly well placed on the page

Much of what I was thinking while drawing is sheer speculation, not helped all that much by hasty online research. Is it important to know Teotihuacan from Totlec, or Colima from Huaxteken, or Nayarit warrior figures from Mayan rattle figures -- and how it all fits together? Well, it would help make "sense" of things...  I don't feel sympatico with a lot of these mesoamerican artifacts, but doing the research has thrown up some relevant vocabulary and it's enjoyable to browse various sites - eg, pre-columbian artifacts on this site, and here, and here; and closer to home, this little pottery dog from Colima, western Mexico, 300BC-300AD, in the British Museum (xolo) -