Berlin Philharmonic Shows How Classical Music Meets the Mass

Berlin Philharmonic Shows How Classical Music Meets the Mass

The Berlin Philharmonic has no shortage of signature events. The New Year’s Eve concert, the European Concert, the Easter Festival in Baden-Baden (now back to Salzburg), the summer Waldbühne open-air, these are among the most reliably sold-out dates in the orchestral calendar. But there is one event that is rarer than any of them, and unlike the others, entirely free: the Open Day. It doesn’t happen every year. It is held biannually, sometimes less, tied to particular occasions rather than a fixed slot in the calendar. That irregularity only adds to its value. When the Philharmonie opens its doors to everyone, it is an occasion that even regular concertgoers treat as exceptional. This year’s Open Day fell on June 21, World Music Day, or in its original French, La Fête de la Musique. The date was no coincidence. First celebrated in Paris in 1982, the day was conceived by Jack Lang, then France’s Minister of Culture, and Maurice Fleuret, with the vision of bringing music out of concert halls and into public spaces, making it accessible to all. It has since spread to more than 120 countries and over 1,000 cities around the world. In Berlin, the entire city throws open its doors on June 21, and this year, that included the Philharmonie itself. The Philharmonie’s Open Day is built around free admission and live music throughout the building, with orchestra and chamber showcases in a wide variety of venues, flashmobs, tours and open-air events through Hans Scharoun’s visionary architecture, and activities for the youngest visitors, including trying instruments, arts and crafts, and family tours. On a normal day, the Philharmonie is not open to the public without a ticket, and even ticket-holders are generally confined to the lobby and the main hall. The Open Day is the rare chance to explore the building from top to bottom and inside out, to hear and see it as a living organism rather than a ticketed destination. This year’s programme ran from 11am to 6pm and was, by any measure, a full day. Two orchestral open rehearsals, seated, first-come first-served, gave audiences the chance to hear chief conductor Kirill Petrenko work through repertoire with the orchestra: not a polished performance, but the real, unvarnished process of music-making at the highest level. For many visitors, this was the draw. The undisputed centrepiece of the lobby programme, however, was the horn flashmob. Principal horn Stefan Dohr, his colleague and section ambassador Sarah Willis, and the new co-principal Yun Zeng, who joined the orchestra in September 2024 after winning first prize at the 2019 Tchaikovsky Competition and previously serving as principal horn of the Staatskapelle Berlin, led an all-star lineup through a crowd-filling session that drew in horn enthusiasts of all ages, including small children clutching toy instruments hearing live horn playing for the very first time. If the mission of an Open Day is to make people fall in love with classical music and the instruments that make it, this was the mission accomplished in real time. One first-time visitor to Berlin, Hamburg based violin student Ljubica Bićanin who plays in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music Chamber Orchestra and had come to the city as part of the ensemble’s preparations for a concert that evening at the Konzerthaus, found herself in a seat at the afternoon open rehearsal and in warm conversation with Yun Zeng. It was her first time inside the Philharmonie and, by any account, a memorable introduction. The full Open Day experience also included a quiet room sponsored by Deutsche Bank, soundproofed and furnished with lounge chairs, a small but telling detail about how thoughtfully the event is staged. The Philharmonie on Open Day is a carefully considered invitation into the full world of the orchestra, paced to welcome visitors who might find a full day of music overwhelming, and rewarding to those who want every minute of it. All of which prompts a natural question: when the Berlin Philharmonic next tours China, could a Chinese promoter or management company make something like this happen: a full Open Day at the Shanghai Grand Opera House or the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing? Free, open to all, no tickets required? The model is proven, the goodwill it generates is enormous, and there is a vast Chinese audience that has heard of the Berlin Philharmonic but never had the chance to encounter it on anything other than ticketed terms. It is, at the very least, an idea worth putting on the table. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com [https://klassikom.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Hong Kong Pulls Back the Curtain on Competition Judging

Every major music competition carries an open secret: the live broadcast shows you the performance, but it never shows you the deliberation. What happens in the jury room — how scores are tallied, what gets argued over, which compromises get struck before a name is announced — has long been the part of the process competitions guard most closely. Jurors sign NDA, media are barred from the room, and even competition officials have historically had no right of entry. The result is an industry built, in part, on rumor: stories of jurors trading favors for their own students, of heated arguments settled by horse-trading rather than merit, of results decided well before the final note is played. Last week, at the 5th International Conducting Competition for Chinese Music in Hong Kong, that veil lifted — at least partially, and at least for the five observers. Invited by the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra to serve as an observer for the competition’s final round, I was granted rare access to the jury room itself from June 25 to 28, present throughout the scoring, tabulation, public disclosure and sign-off process. The NDA still stands — the documents and any discussion inside the room remain undisclosed — but the more striking revelation was procedural: there was barely any discussion to report. Scores were submitted, results were calculated, and the room moved from entry to confirmed outcome in roughly ten minutes. No theatrics, no backroom haggling, nothing eventful or even newsworthy — just numbers doing the talking. It’s a sharp contrast to the picture painted by veteran piano pedagogue Vladimir Viardo, who once described the rules of a music contest during the 2023 Tchaikovsky Competition in blunter terms: the real first round isn’t the preliminary heats, it’s the jury’s initial selections; the real final isn’t the final concert, it’s the jury’s closing discussion. That kind of opacity is precisely what fuels suspicion in classical music’s competition circuit — when the truth is hidden, speculation fills the vacuum. What Hong Kong demonstrated last week was the alternative: a transparent, efficient, almost anticlimactic jury process that the correspondent called unmatched among competitions of its kind, and one other contests would do well to emulate. The transparency mattered because the result it produced was worth getting right. This was the competition’s founding mission from the start. Looking back over a decade, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra leadership had identified a real gap in the field: Chinese orchestras had made strong creative and technical progress — including in instrument reform — but there was a serious shortage of skilled conductors specializing in Chinese music, and no international programmes existed to showcase that talent. The orchestra responded by launching the world’s first International Conducting Competition for Chinese Music in 2011, building on the conducting masterclasses it had already been running. Since then, the competition has been held four times — in 2011, 2014, 2017 and 2019/24 — in partnership with institutions including the Xi’an Conservatory of Music and the Taiwan National Chinese Orchestra, drawing more than 200 entrants from around the world over the years. This year’s edition produced a clear, decisive winner. Conducting the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra in Liu Yuan’s The Zen ofAutumn in the Mountains and a wind-and-percussion arrangement of the Shanxi folk piece The Grand Victory by Zhang Shiye at the final on June 28th, Chen Yu-Chia swept the competition — taking the Champion title along with awards for Best Interpretation of a Hong Kong Work, Most Popular with the Orchestra Members, and Most Popular with the Media. Four trophies, a rare clean sweep, and a result that matched the title of the very piece he conducted: Grand Victory. Second and third place went to Zhang Yang and Chu Che-Min respectively, with all three top finishers hailing from Taiwan. The final-round jury included Bian Zushan (chair), Chew Hee Chiat, Chen Xieyang, Sun Peng and Liu Sha — four of them from mainland China — alongside a separate panel of media observers. What made this year notable wasn’t just who won. It was that, for once, an outside observer could say with confidence the process behind the result was exactly what it appeared to be. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com [https://klassikom.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Where Two Musical Worlds Meet

In this in-depth pre-concert interview conducted at the backstage of Laeiszhalle on June 19th, cellist and conductor Professor Clemens Malich of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg reflects on a landmark evening that brings together Western and Chinese musical traditions on a single stage. The concert features baritone Liao Changyong and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music Chamber Orchestra joined by German musicians in a programme of Huang Zi, Bao Yuankai, Chen Gang, Lu Zaiyi as well as Brahms, Mahler and Ravel, etc. Malich, who also leads the acclaimed Young Classics education program, speaks thoughtfully about why cross-cultural musical exchange matters beyond the concert hall, arguing that deeper mutual understanding between peoples may itself be a path toward resolving conflict. For him, this concert is a homecoming: he traces a long Western fascination with East Asian culture through Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and early 20th-century French music, drawing a direct line to the program’s pairing of Chinese art songs with works by Mahler and Ravel. He also offers an insider’s perspective on the decision to accompany the lieder and art songs with chamber orchestra rather than piano, a choice he sees as both historically grounded and emotionally essential, and pays warm tribute to star baritone Liao Changyong, whose command of German, French, and Chinese repertoire he describes as the mark of a true international artist. The conversation ends with a charming personal note: Malich lives near Mahler’s old Hamburg address and arrived at the Laeiszhalle by bicycl, just as the great composer once did. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com [https://klassikom.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

"I Think I'll Play More Chinese Music"

Hamburg-based violinist Cian Neumann studies under private teacher Michael Holm and is currently completing a social year at a primary school. But on June 19, he steps into a very different kind of classroom: sharing the stage with elite Chinese instrumentalists for a program spanning Mahler, Vivaldi, and contemporary Chinese works. In this pre-concert conversation at Laeiszhalle, Cian speaks with genuine admiration about his Chinese colleagues, singling out the concertmaster’s jaw-dropping technique and echoing his conductor’s reaction to a stunning performance of Vivaldi’s Summer. He also weighs in on star baritone Liao Changyong’s German diction, calling it “really fantastic”, high praise from a native speaker. Having had only passing exposure to Chinese music before, Cian emerges from rehearsals converted, and already planning to bring more of it into his repertoire. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com [https://klassikom.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

"Chinese Music Is Really Enriching"

Ljubica Bićanin, a 22-year-old viola student at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, joins Chinese soloists for a remarkable concert featuring works by Brahms, Mahler, and Ravel — alongside Chinese repertoire she’s performing for the very first time. In this brief pre-concert interview on June 19th in Hamburg, Ljubica shares her delight at collaborating with Chinese musicians, praising the warmth and energy of the orchestra. She also reflects on the experience of playing Chinese music beyond the screen: beautiful in a way she hadn’t expected. And as a German speaker herself, she has a front-row seat to assess the remarkable linguistic range of star baritone Liao Changyong — who performed in German, French, and Chinese in a single evening. The conversation ends with a shared love of Dvořák — a small moment that says everything about music’s ability to bring people together across cultures. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com [https://klassikom.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]