Best Pirce ✨ Berliner Luft – New Year’s Concert DVD – Raphael Christ, Rene Pape 🔔

One of the things DVD can do is capture the sense of an occasion: Berliner Luft admirably gives us the feeling of how it was to be at this 1997 gala in the Unter den Linden State Opera of a reunited Berlin. Daniel Barenboim gives us a mixture of light and very light music; the weightiest items here are the duet “La ci Darem” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni performed with charm and energy by Dorothea Roeschmann and Rene Pape, and Saint-Saens’ Introduction and Rondo Cappricioso given with real fire by the young violinist Raphael Christ. Much of the rest of the programme is standard German lightweight cheerfulness–with songs such as “Untern Linden”, Gluhwurmchen-idyll” and “Berliner Luft”–but Barenboim also gives us a couple of slightly rarer items: Shostakovich’s “Tahiti Trot”, an endlessly inventive paraphrase of “Tea for Two” and Kurt Weill’s celebratory “Berlin im Licht” performed with aplomb by the gravel-voiced HK Gruber. All this accompanied by cutaways of waltzing couples and magicians moving among them doing interesting things with cards and handkerchiefs… –Roz Kaveney