Musikfest 1: Disruptions

As August ends and September begins, the days begin to feel shorter, the first Christmas confections start to appear on the shelves of German supermarkets, and Berlin’s music season gets underway. According to the established tradition, the opening night of the Berlin Philharmonic was followed swiftly by the inaugural concert of Musikfest Berlin, the annual festival in which local orchestras and international guests offer three weeks of provocative programmes that mix established classics with lesser-heard works from recent decades. As part of this year’s festival Berlin audiences will have the chance to hear numerous works by two twentieth-century masters, Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez, both of whom would have been 100 this year.

Indeed it was Berio who provided the overture to this year’s festival … sort of. The first concert, a…