Sam Johnstone is a musician and writer based in Berlin. He has written on classical, contemporary and world music for Sinfini Music, The Cusp and World Music Network, and about the influence of the avant-garde on contemporary music in Germany and Japan whilst studying at Oxford University and SOAS, University of London. Sam blogs at www.spljohnstone.com and tweets at @spljohnstone
Wunderkind Russian piano virtuosi are no novelty in European concert halls. Artistic seriousness and subtle interpretive skill are a harder sell. Daniil Trifonov, a pianist with intelligent and original interpretations that belie a maturity beyond his tender years, closed his season-long residency at the Berlin Philharmonic with a performance of Scriabin's rarely performed piano concerto.
Zubin Mehta and the Berlin Philharmonic have an extraordinary relationship lasting over five decades. In three performances in the Philharmonie, Mehta paired a piece from the core of his romantic repertoire with a new percussion concerto.
With a semi-staged production, directed by Benjamin Davis, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra has also been bringing George Benjamin's opera to concert hall audiences.
Now entering his second season as Chief Conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, Robin Ticciati is keen to show the breadth of his repertoire and the extent of the orchestra’s abilities.
Over 10 years after his death, Karlheinz Stockhausen still occupies a complex and difficult place in the canon of contemporary composers. This year's Musikfest Berlin featured a Stockhausen focus, of which the "creation ceremony" Inori was the climax.
Jürgen Flimm bowed out of his role as Intendant of the Berlin State Opera with the German premiere of Salvatore Sciarrino's Ti vedo, ti sento, mi perdo.
Aperghis’ migrants and a new arrangement of Janáček’s The Diary of One who Disappeared by Schöllhorn were well-handled treatments of their subject matter, yet burdened by an overwrought conceptual framework.
After Jonathan Meese's Parsifal staging was rejected by Bayreuth, he channelled his frustrations into an "arch-Parsifal" which shoots the titular hero into space, with a musical re-imagining of Wagner’s score by Austrian composer Bernhard Lang.
In L’Invisible, which had its première last weekend at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Aribert Reimann has condensed three plays by Maeterlinck into bite-size chunks that vanish before they can be savoured.
The first edition of the New Life Festival, dedicated to Jewish musicians who fled from or suffered under the National Socialist regime during the Second World War, uncovered some hidden gems.
Three concerts over one day at the opening weekend of Bachfest Leipzig combined Bach’s music with that of composers from Rachmaninov to Sibelius, but nothing matches the unrivalled bliss of Bach’s own music performed with total conviction.
The Staatskapelle Berlin brought a showcase programme to the Berlin Philharmonie under chief conductor Daniel Barenboim and made a case for themselves as one of the best bands performing today.
Overshadowed by its Hanseatic cousin Hamburg, Antwerp recently celebrated the opening of its own new concert hall. In his Symphony no. 2, Wim Henderickx tested the hall's capabilities with a multi-media extravaganza.
Teodor Currentzis, bad boy of early music, appeared at the Konzerthaus Berlin with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and MusicAeterna for a performance that turned it up to 11.
Vikingur Ólafsson, a daring and unique artist, never repeated himself in a performance of Philip Glass' Etudes for piano as part of the Berlin Konzerthaus' "Festival USA".
