The Rundfunkchor Berlin is interviewed about the Berlin Radio Choir's Pandemic-era concert installation "The World to Come".
A professional “radio choir” might seem like a performing arts organization far removed from daily reality. Not so: Rundfunkchor Berlin has been at the forefront of every major development in modern Germany’s history.
Among the first choirs heard in family living rooms, Rundfunkchor Berlin premiered Kurt Weill’s music during the progressive interwar years and surely fought bitter culture wars against the ascendant National Socialists until the choir was renamed Reichssenders Berlin in 1933.
In a sadly-walled city, the radio choir sang the premiers of Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony and Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible.
Then, as the city reconciled the First and Second Worlds, the radio choir premiered music by Pierre Boulez, Michael Tippett, Hans Werner Henze, György Kurtág and Xiao-song Qu.
So, it should surprise no one that the Rundfunkchor Berlin would “broaden choir music” by creating a “concert installation” – an interactive live-concert museum tour – to explore the future with invited guests, world class musicians from different genres such as Moor Mother, Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, Planningtorock, Colin Self and Birke Bertelsmeier.
Come welcome Rundfunkchor Berlin and Tilman Hecker, the “concert installation’s” creator, as well as composer Birke J. Bertelsmeier, to our show for a socially-distanced walk through our shared human experience.