Our festival “Vom Anfangen” (“Of Beginnings”) started on Februar 14 with Mahler's Fourth, that dubious heaven full of violins, interpreted by the Konzerthausorchester, Jonathan Nott and soprano Camilla Tilling. Together with the Trickster Orchestra and other independent ensembles, the second part of the opening concert presented the utopia of a trans-traditional symphony orchestra. The guided improvisation “Amphiphilie“ was conducted by composer Cymin Samawatie.

“Arab Song” interwove melodies from Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon with contemporary jazz and fusion elements. Trance-like beats and hypnotic sounds from Moroccan Gnawa music heated up the atmosphere before everyone came together on stage in the third part of the session to celebrate the diversity of Arab musical traditions with surprising improvisations. “Coming Home With Music” – in the morning, the Lautten Compagney Berlin with countertenor Reginald Mobley had already brought the “American Dream” to the stage in gospel, African-American spirituals, baroque arias, and pop song arrangements as the original dream of arriving, being at home, and belonging.

Grimm's fairy tale “Frau Holle” was the basis for the sound collage called “Vom Unfertigen” (On unfinished things) about “life with its unfinished aspects and unfinished beginnings,” which was created in weekly workshops with young students from Campus Rütli. Also on stage during the first festival week was the Chaos String Quartet, which lived up to its name by dedicating itself to the often ambivalent but highly creative state between confusion and new creation in works by Haydn, Rebel, and Ligeti, as well as fugues by Bach and Beethoven. The reasons for and the pain of procrastination were also the subject of a later concert by Berlin singer-songwriters & Berlin Strings as well as in Nele Pollatschek's reading from her novel „Little Problems“ with our KHO wind quintet.

But first, the beauty of the fragment came into its own: Franz Schubert's “Unfinished” makes “the beyond audible” for Joana Mallwitz again and again; his works were her initial spark to spend her life with music. For soloist Tabea Zimmermann, the viola in Bartók's unfinished concerto for viola “sings, dances, cries, and comforts” anew each time it is performed—as it did on February 20 and 21 in the Great Hall. 

The Berlin vocal ensemble The Present celebrated female creativity and creativity over four centuries with its new Marian Vespers “Ex Utero,” followed on the third and final weekend by the musical setting of Christian early faith par excellence—Joseph Haydn's “The Creation.” The Konzerthausorchester, the RIAS Kammerchor, the quintet of vocal soloists Elsa Dreisig, Kieran Carrel, Tareq Nazmi, Julia Grüter, and Michael Nagl, as well as Joana Mallwitz, shared the joys of universal beginnings with their audience from February 27 to March 1 in the sold-out Great Hall at the end of the festival—a feeling that ultimately erupted in long, enthusiastic applause.