Concert review: Opening night at Boulez Saal in Berlin with Christian Tetzlaff (violin) and Leif Ove Andsnes (piano)

In his famously mischievous binary, Ned Rorem asserted that ‘the entire solar system is torn between two aesthetics: French and German’ – with the kicker: ‘If you agree with all this, you’re French. If you disagree, you’re German’. 

Opening night at Boulez Saal turned the dichotomy into dialogue: Mozart answered by Ravel, Brahms by a luminous, colour-rich new work from a Korean composer who draws on the lineage of Messiaen via George Benjamin. 

But the real throughline was the more layered sense of dialogue that this central Berlin chamber music venue actively cultivates. Frank Gehry’s warm, wood-panelled oval room fosters immediate rapport between audience and musicians, while Boulez Saal’s philosophy overall relishes setting the familiar alongside the new and amplifying lesser-known voices.

And the partnership between violinist Christian Tetzlaff and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is the kind that turns virtuosity into genuine dialogue. Their shared musical vision shaped Mozart’s A major Sonata, K.526, a product of the later Vienna years (1787), into a fascinating study in balances and complementarity. 

Andsnes brought firm outlines and an extrovert clarity to his playing, while Tetzlaff coloured in the contours with gracefully shaded phrasing. The slow movement was especially refined, every nuance suspended in quiet concentration, before the finale set off with playful kinetics, fleet yet precisely controlled.

Ravel’s G major Sonata, which occupied him for several years in the 1920s (and which was premièred by no less a violinist than George Enescu, with the composer at the keyboard), seemed to emerge from another sound world. Its long gestation is reflected in the first movement’s unpredictable lines, which Tetzlaff drew out with spellbinding suspense, as if the music’s destination were never a foregone conclusion.

The middle ‘Blues’ movement featured delectably deadpan pizzicato that set the tone for Ravel’s Gershwin-tinged fantasy. In the finale, despite the composer’s belief that the two instruments belong to separate sound worlds, violin and piano merged like a single organism in perpetual motion – a whirligig spinning in crisp focus.

In Brahms’s D minor Violin Sonata, the duo achieved a profound unity of expression. Tetzlaff’s feathery, ruminative lines contrasted with passionate, full-bowed outbursts at climaxes. The music carried a tragic, almost resigned air, yet with flashes of vitality – as though Brahms were stepping back for the moment into the fray of life and love.

The relatively brief Adagio bore the imprint of an almost shockingly beautiful simplicity that gave way to the enigmatically fleeting scherzo – suggesting repressed flickers of mischief – before the mood swings of the Presto agitato finale.

The evening concluded with an ardent presentation of the newest work on the programme: Donghoon Shin’s Winter Sonata for violin and piano, premièred by Tetzlaff and Andsnes earlier this summer. Lasting just over 15 minutes, this single-movement piece stages a confrontation between tonality and atonality, between the consolations of the past and present uncertainties. 

Originally from South Korea and now based in London, Shin studied with George Benjamin, and Winter Sonata shows a French-leaning ear for refined colours and intricate rhythms. At the same time, it glances towards Beethoven in its development section, which Shin characterises as ‘a twisted, almost mocking (!) parody’ of the German composer’s procedures. 

‘Winter Sonata was originally only a working title’, according to Shin. ‘But as the harmonic contrast between winter and spring themes developed, I realised it truly represented the work… Outside my studio window a pair of magpies built a nest, returning each spring to rebuild. It is often in such small things that we find hope’.

As a quiet coda, the encore – the Adagio from Mozart’s E-flat Sonata, K.481 – was offered with a prayerful but never heavy-handed reverence, like a benediction in hard times.

The rest of the Boulez Saal season can be found here.

THOMAS MAY