#berlin philharmonic

As someone accustomed to going to live music on a regular basis, going four months without it has felt punitive. I know so many musicians who survive by gigging, relying on income from playing frequently. So the withdrawal I feel as a listener must feel even more restricted on performers.

As a not-fully-satisfactory substitute, I have been watching a lot of concerts online. I enjoyed the Bang On A Can Marathon in June, and enjoyed some really exciting performances - even when Nico Muhly broke the internet midway through the event. The finale, featuring Terry Riley in an appropriately psychedelic visual environment, provided a particularly sweet conclusion to the day’s activity. 

I’ve also spent a lot of time enjoying concerts (and ballets and operas) from Europe, which seems to have a better handle on the whole streaming phenomenon than U.S. orchestras (though our friends in Detroit have been doing a bang-up job!). Watching concerts online, with cameras capable of getting up-close to the performers onstage, had resulted in a number of crushes on key players that I didn’t know before, but whom I look forward to seeing and hearing more in the future.

Let’s start with the folks at the Berlin Philharmonic. The Berlin Phil decided to make its online concert archive (ordinarily a paid subscription) free for a month. So I had a great time listening to programs there, and found a number of the players to be quite adorable. High among these is 1st principal cellist Bruno Delepelaire, who began his career in France before migrating to Berlin. He was featured in solos a number of times, I I’d gladly watch him play anytime. 

The same goes for his colleague in the viola section, Amihai Grosz, who again had a distinguished career before getting to the Philharmonic.

Germans love titles, so I was amused that the hunky bass trombone player in Berlin was one of the few musicians designated as “Professor.” Stefan Schulz has a full-time teaching position, and is a composer as well as a trombonist.

But Berlin wasn’t the only orchestra I spent time watching. The Rotterdam Philharmonic did a wonderful performance of the Mahler Fifth, with their conductor, Yannick Nezet-Seguin. I then watched the same ensemble perform the Mahler Eighth, and promptly fell for baritone soloist Markus Werba. I am apparently not alone in this: he appears prominently on the “bari-hunk” websites, and there are plenty of pictures of him online shirtless (and then some). He can sing in my shower anytime…

And on the topic of opera, I might mention that the new conductor-in-chief of the Amsterdam Opera is the lovely and talented Lorenzo Viotti.

I’m sorry if I sound like a dirty old man here, turning these high culture websites into cruising scenes, but think of it as compensation for what is lost from the live experince of hearing music. Since I’m denied the true presence and sound of live music, the least I can do is enjoy the physical attractiveness of the musicians. And I will resist the temptation to extol the beauty of youth, and simply note that violist Matthew Lipman is originally from Chicago, and he provided one of the most enjoyable aspects of some programs on Live from Lincoln Center…Play on, my boy, play on.