Hugo Hamilton's novel, Surrogate City, was the inspiration behind a remarkable musical collaboration in Berlin this month, writes Derek Scally
Welcoming young people into the ritualised world of classical music has become a tired cliche spouted by trendy arts managers. The work of Sir Simon Rattle is an exception. Music education for young people and outreach projects have been at the centre of his work in the five years since he took up tenure at the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, arguably the world's best.
Each year the orchestra abandons its formal dress and the golden glow of its circus-tent-like concert hall on Berlin's Potsdamer Platz. Its destination: a one-time East Berlin bus depot where it works with a choreographer and local schoolchildren, often from disadvantaged backgrounds. The results of their collaborations are extraordinary.
In 2004, the orchestra and children staged a breathtaking Rite of Spring Project, set to Stravinky's music. The rehearsal process and performance is captured in the gripping documentary film, Rhythm Is It!. In the film, Rattle explains that he felt he wouldn't be doing his job unless he reached out to people, in particular young people.
"If we're just high priests, who are going to be the evangelists?" he asked. "Everybody must feel that this is their music, that they need this in their lives. Otherwise it will die because people will think it's a luxury project, wonderful but not necessary. We must be part of the city."
Last weekend, Rattle and his musicians proved that they are as much a part of Berlin as the Brandenburg Gate with their latest outreach project, a new staging of Surrogate Citiesby contemporary composer Heiner Goebbels.
The 1994 work draws its title from Surrogate City, the 1990 debut novel by Irish author Hugo Hamilton, set in still- divided Berlin. The author and his wife, Mary Rose Doorly, were the guests of honour at this month's performance of the work.
"Heiner Goebbels got in contact with me after the book came out. He said he loved the title of the book and created a symphony around the title, which he changed to Surrogate Cities. He described it as a symphony about urbanisation and alienation. That's something I come to Berlin every so often to experience," jokes the author, who spends part of the year in the German capital.
Hamilton had never seen the work performed live until this year.
Goebbels (55) is Germany's most prominent contemporary composer, whose works include Verkommenes Ufer (Waste Shore)and Die Befreiung des Prometheus (The Liberation of Prometheus). Surrogate Citiespremiered in 1994 as a piece for Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern. Drawing on the city as source material is an obvious choice for a composer who describes himself as a "music architect", and who creates acoustic space to be brought to life and explored by the imagination of the audience.
"I stay almost exclusively in cities. I can't sleep in the country, it's too quiet for me," says Goebbels.
Music critics view his work, which often has a political edge, as an attempt to bridge the gap between theatre and opera. In Surrogate Cities, Goebbels presents music and images, texts and movement as equal partners in the complex city structure of the present and the past. This work also allows the composer to explore the city as a musical archaeologist, uncovering layers of the city's past to preserve them for the present.
"It's the task of art to be original as well as to build on the treasure of societal experience and to preserve what is in danger of being lost," he says.
The work defies categorisation, with waves of edgy orchestral melodies combined with a multilayered aural collage, involving rock beats, jazz and blues riffs, nods to earlier classical works, synthesiser samples, even the haunting voices from old 78rpm records of Jewish cantors from the 1930s. Framing the evening is the exploration of the cityscape through texts by Paul Auster and the East German author, Heiner Müller, with reference to Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino. But the evening begins with the scene-setting opening lines of Hamilton's book:
She has been running. What for? Now she has slowed down again; out of breath, close to the side of the buildings, along the mosaic pavement of a street in Berlin. Mosaic pavements make you dizzy, if you've been running.What makes a young woman run? During the day? In the city?
THE PRODUCTION, RETITLED MusikTanz - Surrogate Cities, was a full orchestra version of the piece, brought to life by 120 lay dancers directed by French choreographer Mathilde Monnier and her team from the Centre Choréographique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon.
The dancers were drawn from four different groups, bringing with them their variying perceptions of the city: children from a nearby primary school; youths from an amateur dance company; young adults from a local kung fu group; and senior citizens from a Berlin tea-dance group.
Monnier worked on a dance partitur (a written choreographic plan) in France, but on arriving in Berlin was happy to discard swathes of ideas during what would become a lively collaborative process.
"I was very interested in the perceptions of the dancers," she said. "I made suggestions, but they have enough free space to try their own ideas and are involved in the choreography."
At the start of the evening, the dancers sketch images in chalk on the stage surface, images that are as transient as their dreams and which get washed away to create room for new ideas and dreams. Then the dancers begin to work with their bodies, imitating streets, buildings, bridges; a collage of movement in keeping with the composer's non-narrative approach.
Monnier says she was anxious not to try and force a "message" on the audience, but instead wanted to impart some of the transitory wisdom gained in passing from the varied inhabitants of a big city.
"What power does the city have over the individual? How can individuals assert themselves so as not to be swallowed up by this huge, uncontrollable mass?" she asks. "Our movements shouldn't illustrate a story, rather say something about the people performing them. Everything is possible."
Surrogate Citiescertainly went down a storm with the audience. "In the end, Sir Simon Rattle and his orchestra score on all fronts," wrote the Berliner Morgenpostnewspaper afterwards. "The jubilation in the sold-out Arena is huge and just as overpowering as the aural and visual experience that spread itself about here with sheer inexhaustibility."
It was an inspired decision to stage the work in Berlin, still the "surrogate city" of Hugo Hamilton's novel, still on a nervous hunt for its own identity nearly two decades after the fall of the wall. The venue was a perfect choice too: a hangar-like, red-brick former bus shelter, which for nearly three decades sat on the edge of the no man's land between East and West Berlin. Opposite the hall is one of the city's few remaining Cold War border watchtowers, an anachronistic nod to the German capital's pent-up reinvention potential.
Simon Rattle is confident that it is through projects like his that the future existence of classical orchestras and music can be best secured. "It's about inventing music," the conductor told the Frankfurter Rundschaunewspaper. "And playing it and listening intently to it."
