We are Berliners!

It's been an emotional day for LA Chamber Orchestra music director Jeffrey Kahane, whose mother was born here in Germany and grew up in nearby Magdeburg. As Jews in Nazi Germany, several of his close family members, including a grandfather and great uncle, were sent to concentration camps. Later, another great uncle became the head of documentation at the Nuremberg trials.

Years later, Jeffrey performed here in Germany and had some amazingly cathartic and moving experiences with audience members who reached out to him. One elderly German handed him a rose and a candle, expressing the wish to personally atone for what happened to Kahane's family during the Third Reich.

So to arrive here in Berlin on a beautiful, sunny, crisp afternoon today with his own American orchestra based in Berlin's first sister city of Los Angeles.....it's quite extraordinary. On top of that, Jeff has been thinking about how LA provided safe harbor to so many European artists and musicians during that dark period: Stravinsky, the Feuchtwangers, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Toch, Eric Zeisl, and on and on..........

So in a sense Jeffrey himself feels like a bridge between the old era and the new.

And oh, how Berlin is new!

My own last trip occured 21 years ago, before the "wende", as Berliners call it, the "Turn"; that is, the tearing down of the Wall. Some friends and I gingerly ventured past the armed guards and barbed wire into East Berlin for an hour, only to be terribly sobered by the dreary streets and architecture and people, the lack of any spark, the greyness of it all. (Well, the sheet music was cheap; that was the only plus.)

Now, what used to be East Berlin is like a sprawling urban Tomorrowland....outlandish architecture, high-rises sparkling with rainbow-colored lights, neon-lit malls, hipper than hip housing projects, massive hotels, eateries, clubs everywhere. Tomorrow I'll visit Pottsdammerplatz...and possibly the Holocaust memorial and Jewish Museum.

And LACO plays its single Berlin concert tomorrow night. I can't wait to hear Mezzo-Soprano Vesselina Kasarova sing Mozart and Rossini. She's been breaking hearts throughout Italy and Germany on the first leg of the tour. Orchestra players say she's sensational and extremely engaging. This will be my chance to see what all the fuss is about!

By the way, the first reviews are in from Hannover. Highly positive of this "Hollywood" orchestra. And the critics are floored by the all-female first violin section. Remember the fuss made when the Berlin Philharmonic finally hired its first woman, the extraordinary principal clarinet, Sabine Meyer? She lasted, what, half a season?

According to Kissler, this is one area where Germany is still way behind the U.S. Women comprise only 10-20% of the country's great orchestras. Kissler says, sometimes here, there are those that have their thoughts back in the 19th century.

Meanwhile, tonight, Berlin dignitaries fussed over the Kahanes and LA Chamber Orchestra executives and patrons at the famous "red" Rathaus, or City Hall. Jeffrey read a proclamation from LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and was celebrated by the Berlin State Secretary Barbara Kissler. The culinary highlight hands down: Blood red oranges atop a creme brulee! We took a tour, and were shown an entire wall commemorating the names and dates and places of death of Jewish members of the German Parliament who perished under the Third Reich.

Berlin is coming to grips with its past and future. As Kissler says, after many, many problems with re-unification; financial, psychological and logistical problems that seemed for awhile insurmountable, Berlin has begun to accept itself as a single, unified, city.

Still, amid the majestic monuments, cranes are everywhere. There's an electricity in the air. It's a city exploding with joy.


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