The Maertz Musik festival is all about modern music, contemporary composition and things audibly alternative (sometimes known as pesky and annoying, see here.) Tuesday night's concert was "turmmusik," which, logically, is meant to be played in a tower. But in a tower that spins! This made my little contemporary-classical young heart go pitter-patter. Live orchestral music is always cool, but if a bit of theater and nausea is thrown in, well, all the better.
The turm's Telecafe hasn't lost any of its 60s chic. It's easy to imagine gray-suited DDR big-wigs and ladies with shellacked beehives slurping soup while admiring both the view and the macrame-mirrored walls. Yet before I could get all goo-goo eyed at the cool view exactly 207.53 meters below, I had to grab onto something. This revolving restaurant hauls ass, lapping itself three times every hour; I can only sympathize with the daily inner-ear torture of the wait staff. I'm one of those annoying types who can read in the car and ride backwards, tricks that when simply mentioned can turn motion-sick people a lovely shade of green. But the spin gave me wobbly sea legs in like seconds, and halfway through my glass of wine I was fixedly staring at a piece of lint on the tablecloth as it seemed to be the only physical object not about to fly into orbit.
And then there were the musicians, set around the room in a perfect circle. The cellist got to park next to the cigarette machine, while the violinist sat in front of the coffee station. They played musical tag for about an hour -- conductor-less, the musicians had to fiddle with their parts all alone, occasionally looking left or right to see what the neighboring trumpet or stand-up bass was up to, occasionally playing "musical wave" and passing a note from one to another until the circle was complete.I was hoping for more tag-you're-it themes, something like Bartok-does-ring-around-the-rosy, but most of the hour-long piece was pips and squeaks and full-frontal tuba assaults when our revolution met him at just the right moment. There was even a bit of musical chairs, with the clarinet doing a lap and finding her seat before the flute got there, and the percussion-types looking all jealous because they couldn't roll a xylophone anywhere without taking out a few spectators. And then it was all over, and we wandered out, ears popping in the six-meters-per-second elevator, walking across the way to the Alexanderplatz U-bahn with a slight list, like crippled grocery carts.
