A German Ear Listens to China — and Likes What It Hears

A German Ear Listens to China — and Likes What It Hears

He was born in Hamburg, grew up in its orchestras, and is weeks away from his graduation recital. But for violinist Ilya Altınçınar, a student at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg in the class of Professor Caroline Onimus, the concert at Laeiszhalle on June 19th offered something his conservatoire training hadn’t yet: the experience of sharing a stage with seasoned professionals from a different musical tradition entirely. Interviewed ahead of the concert that night, Altınçınar — whose parents are from southern Turkey, giving him a personal familiarity with musical cultures beyond the Western canon — spoke warmly about what it meant to perform alongside the members of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music Chamber Orchestra, all professors at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. For a student still completing his degree, the encounter carried a particular weight. The programme itself was an unusual one. Works by Mahler and Ravel, typically performed with piano accompaniment, were presented here in chamber orchestra arrangements, a format Altınçınar found well-suited to the music, noting that the fuller orchestral sound offered a tonal balance that a solo piano or harp might not always achieve. Chinese art songs rounded out an evening that moved between Western Romanticism and the pentatonic landscapes of Chinese music, the latter something Altınçınar associated with nature, harmony and stillness, and which he found deeply calming. The concert’s centrepiece was baritone Prof Liao Changyong, one of China’s most celebrated singers. Altınçınar, listening as both a musician and a native German speaker, was struck not only by the richness and presence of Liao’s voice, powerful enough to fill the hall on the strength of his vibrato alone, but by the exceptional clarity of his German diction. For a language often considered forbidding in its density of consonants, Liao’s text was, in Altınçınar’s assessment, entirely and effortlessly intelligible. His graduation recital, featuring Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A minor, two Sarasate Spanish Dances, and the complete Bach Partita in D minor, lies just ahead. But on this June evening in Hamburg, the young violinist found himself part of something broader: a concert that brought Shanghai and Hamburg into the same room, and made the distance between them feel, for a few hours, very small. Interviewed and filmed on June 19th, 2026 in Hamburg. 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]

Trailblazing Concert Hall Stands Strong

Step inside Hamburg’s landmark Elbphilharmonie, renowned for its cutting-edge acoustics and its welcoming Plaza, where sweeping panoramic views reveal both the city’s historic waterfront and its industrial skyline. The Elbphilharmonie is celebrating its tenth anniversary this season, marking a decade as one of the world’s most influential concert halls. 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]

Prolonged Silence at Mahler Ninth

Under the baton of Zhang Liang, the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra performed Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 last night at the Shanghai Oriental Art Centre. The audience observed more than four minutes of silence after the final chord, as captured in this amateur video. Given the notoriously overdeveloped clapping muscles of some concertgoers, that may have been the highest compliment both Mahler and the performers could have received in Shanghai. 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]

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]