The Beautiful Paint-job Hopelessly Marred

Die Philharmonie brennt! Everyone’s favorite exteriorially eye-soring interiorially acoustically-marvelling building in Berlin – the Philharmonie – caught on fire yesterday (Tuesday). Apparently, some welders were working on the roof, heard that I was in town and actually enjoying my life, so decided to put that to an end. Though, through some massive number of fire trucks (30ish) and personelle (200ish), they were able to save the hall (according to the article I read, there was only a relatively small amount of water (I think relative to the large amount of water sprayed onto the building) dripping into the hall itself, and that the firefighters spread out plastic on the seats to protect them. It’s as of yet still hard to tell what the impact will be, but hopefully it won’t be too bad and the concert schedule won’t be too severely derailed.

My friend Dan emailed me before I had a chance to write this post about this news, and included in his email a joke that I think I would have come up with on my own – especially given that Jansons (it still blows my mind that Mariss Jansons, given how much of a rock-star he is in Europe now, was ever Musical Director of Pittsburgh (too bad our hall (acoustically) pretty well sucked (as did our Principal Trumpeter (seeing orchestras with good trumpets inevitably leads to me hating on George (for good reason – I didn’t like him back when I saw the PSO on a weekly basis (I’d like to think (and in my imagination do play it out this way (as previously alluded to in the last blog post where I mentioned the Principal trumpet fucking up PSO concerts)) that Mariss didn’t like him either) and was vocal about it then too (though we didn’t have a blog back then))))) is conducting the Philharmoniker in a performance (hopefully to still occur) of Shostakovich’s 6th Symphony (and Berio’s Folk Songs!) – but he recommend that once the hall reopens I attend the next concert dressed as Shostakovich.

So hopefully that won’t be too much of a damper on my concert-going (though, honestly, if the hall is out of commission even for just a week it will fuck up my plans pretty badly (few if any of the other halls in Berlin have standing room seats, so even if the BP changes venue there’d be no way for me to see the concert). I’ll update y’all as whatever happens – or actually, once I post again about seeing a concert at the Philharmonie, you’ll know that concerts are going on there again.