A Carter Sandwich

On our last night in Berlin, we went to hear the Staatsoper Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim.  The program was three Mozart pieces, framing two works by Eliot Carter, (both written after the age of 100), "Sunbeam's Architecture" and a bass clarinet concerto.  We were eager to hear the Carter, as his music is never, ever performed in Vancouver, and in fact quite rarely in New York, now that the novelty factor of his advanced age has worn off.  The major disappointment, though, was that the tenor who was to sing both some Mozart arias and the first Carter piece was not feeling well. Thus the Mozart was terrible, and the Carter piece was canceled at the last minute.   I loved the bass clarinet concerto; it still sounded like the Carter I know of his earlier periods, but with more clarity and relative simplicity.  I wish I could hear more of this music!   With the Mozart, I found Barenboim's conducting overly idiosyncratic and impossible to watch.  He sometimes does nothing, leaning with one hand on the railing in front of the podium, waiting for something which he abruptly decides to emphasize.  Vera liked his Haffner Symphony alot, though.

We woke up at 6 AM to catch our plane to New York, dodging the few remaining piles of snow, and arrived in New York to find summer in full swing, with the temperature 82 degrees.

Berlin Mitte

Yesterday, our last in Berlin, I took a long walk through the central area of "old" Berlin, while Vera did Vera things.   I started out in Prenzlauerberg, where we had rented an apartment.  Prenzlauerberg has made the transition from being an area where post-reunification squatters first settled, then to being the hip Williamsburg of Berlin, and now it is more like Park Slope, with baby strollers abounding.  It has lots of nice cafes and restaurants, and has more of the untouched flavor of the old city.   (We were staying in a building which had once been one of the famed workers barracks of Berlin, now nicely renovated.)   I saw this historic former water tower, which had been turned into apartments.

I also saw these three accordion players at Alexanderplatz, who were doing a very lively and precise version of the storm music from the Four Seasons:

I then walked on to the central part of the Mitte area, which is the heart of the old Imperial Berlin.  This area, of course, was mostly destroyed in WW2, and has been under construction/restoration/redestruction for the past 60 years.  And from the looks of it, its going to take another 60 years to finish.   The whole area is still a vast construction site:

The opera house is being renovated, and they are apparently going to rebuild the original Schloss, the home of the Hohenzollerns, which was torn down in an anti-imperialist frenzy by the East Germans after the war.  It makes for a bizzare landscape, where fragments of original facades abut against simulated facades, or totally modern facades.
And those pipes are everywhere!  Fun pictures for me to take:

The left building is a fake facade on a framework, the right is an old church.

The Berlin town hall, with that pesky Fehnsenturm:

Berlin is still striking for its vast amounts of unbuilt space, and, in some cases, abandoned buildings that look like contemporary Detroit abut brand new flashy constructions.  And, this being Berlin, when there are empty buildings, squatters move in.   Here, in a view from the window of a very nice apartment, is a squatters habitation, along with a clearly expressed opinion of the next potential stage in gentrification:

A fascinating city, always transforming itself,,,