Concert Fail and a Hockey Game

We had a VERY cold week last week, between 7 and 10 degrees most days, with an occasional high of 12. It snowed first so the white has stayed put pretty well until today, when suddenly it has been almost 40 and I don't really need the extra-warm hat and slightly warmer dog-park coat I just bought. There is still a lot of winter to get through, though, so I'm sure I'll get my money's worth by March.

This clearly did not turn out to be the daily disciplined writing I had hoped for, but the days have begun to blend together and move so rapidly it has gotten hard to keep track of what I've done. I have been to a lot of museums: the Pergamon, the Neues Museum, the Altes Museum, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Bode, the Guggenheim, the Berlinishe Galerie, the Dali Museum, the Illustrators Forum, the Berggruen, the Bröhan, the Hamburg Banhof, the Kunstgewerbemuseum, some of them multiple times by now. I've also spent a lot of hours at the Volkspark walking Maggie and hanging out at the Hundplatz, getting impromptu German lessons and making acquaintances of dogs and people alike. And then there have been the Christmas markets and concerts I've been attending lately.

The third concert, on Sunday afternoon, was not what I expected. For one thing it wasn't in the Dom itself, but in one of the separate chapels which could have doubled as a meat locker it was so cold. I got a front row seat, but that didn't matter as the choir, the Capella Cantorum Berlin, performed in a loft where nobody could see them. The 300-year-old Italian organ was also in the loft, so nobody could see it either. What I was left looking at were a couple of huge and quite ghastly religious paintings, one of the Pentecost I think, as the altar piece, and one other mumbly composition with lots of rolling eyeballs, gesticulating digits and stiffly floating drapery off to one side. There was a vast quantity of liver-colored marble as well, in the huge columns supporting the ceiling and in the altar itself. Maybe not my favorite stone.

The 17th-century Northern German music would have been lovely if the basic a cappella men's choir had been left alone to do its thing, but someone's misplaced zeal mandated the addition of a boys' choir to the mix. We know that everyone loves the Vienna Choirboys, but these were not they; being shrill and unblended they were a distraction rather than an enhancement. A rather tedious hour, it was, and with nothing else for my visual sense to latch onto besides the paintings, it led me to wish very much for a Pentecostal-like revelation of German as a language I can suddenly speak and understand.

Musical entertainments were punctuated by a hockey game on Friday night, to which I was invited by one of my gracious dog park friends, who is a sports psychologist with the Berlin team. I sat with his parents who were visiting from Frankfurt, his fiancee and a friend of hers, as he, of course, had to sit with the team. There were the usual stadium-pounding loudspeakers spewing rock music before the teams appeared and stupid contests for fans at the intervals, but much less hawking of merchandise and food and very little rambunctious behavior in the stands. One whole end section of the arena is designed just for standing - no seats at all, just rails to lean on. This was filled with the die-hard and well organized fans of the former East German team, who still - and continually - shout out the old cheers to the beat of a couple of drums hammered mercilessly by unrelenting pack leaders. Most of them were dressed in team jerseys, and despite the constant goading by the drums they were very orderly in their enthusiasm. The whole game was surprisingly tame - much more like the college hockey games I've seen, but then the Berlin team - the Eisbären or Polar Bears - is on the first rung of a five-rung league structure and still seem to play by strategy and skill rather than brute force. Not that my take on hockey means a hoot, but hey.

I completed my Christmas music entertainment schedule this evening, back at the Dom for a superb concert by the Rundfunkchor Berlin ( the Berlin Broadcasting Company) - in a very unusual program of newer music, at least mostly 20th-century; a spectacular piece by a young Latvian composer called "Sun Dogs", parts of a Rachmaninoff Vespers liturgy that was as rich and haunting as anything I've heard, a couple of organ solos, ending with the required German carols "Vom Himmel Hoch","Stille Nacht" and "Er ist ein Ros entsprungen", all of which I have heard at the previous concerts in one form or another. And I'm sorry, but nothing can induce me to like organ music.