Benjamin Kobler News Today

There’s a marked element of excess thought surrounding this adventurous ten-day Berlin festival of “moderne” composition. Its schedule is loaded with afternoon discussions, panels, laboratories, and general conceptual wrangling, but much of the evening performances are emphatically visceral, jagged, unpredictable, and disobedient toward implied traditional staging requirements of new works.

A veteran conductor’s Bach, a young conductor’s Sibelius, and works by Tom Johnson, Gyorgy Kurtag and Kate Soper are among recent highlights.