Playful Baroque 
30 years with the Berliner Barock Solisten

One of the best-known chamber formations drawn from the ranks of the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Berliner Barock Solisten's success owes much to the ensemble's ability to combine early music with the style of playing that is invariably associated with the orchestra. The group now celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of its formation. Here we speak to the violinist Raimar Orlovsky, who is the ensemble’s organizer and manager.

Congratulations on your thirtieth anniversary! You are one of the founding members of your ensemble, although the initial spark came from Rainer Kussmaul, who was then the leader of the Berliner Philharmoniker. You not only shared a love of early music, you both enjoyed playing football. Indeed, football played a significant role in the formation of your ensemble.

How did this come about? The initial impetus actually came from Claudio Abbado: in the mid-1990s, we performed Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos with the orchestra under his direction. Afterwards, he asked us if we players didn’t want to continue working in the field of early music over and above this one particular project. For the present we ignored the idea – until Rainer Kussmaul invited me to watch a game of football with him one evening. It was during this game that we decided to form the Barock Soloisten. From the word go our tasks were clearly defined: Rainer was responsible for the artistic side of things, I was responsible for all organizational matters and everything related to the business side of things. We gave no concerts at all during the first eighteen months, but simply rehearsed, while building up our repertoire and developing a feel for early music. But we also took the conscious decision to play on modern instruments.

What was the reason? Back then, it was all part of the same trend to use period instruments, or replicas of historical instruments.

There were pragmatic reasons for this. The rehearsals for our new ensemble were often held during the midday breaks in the orchestra’s own rehearsals, so it really wasn’t feasible for us to switch instruments on a day like that. Instead, we adapted our style of playing to suit the existing setup and tried out Baroque bows, lower pitch and gut strings. This makes a big difference for string players, because our instruments then sound much less tautly-strung. Back then the attitude to early music was very purist, whereas we wanted to introduce our Philharmoniker sound and technical precision to the world of early music. This isn’t a contradiction in terms, but  it represents our own special reading of this repertoire.

As orchestral players, you don't often perform Baroque music. Where did you develop your affinity with early music?

In my own case, I felt this affinity from an early age, as I was still a child and an adolescent when I became fascinated by Baroque music. I attended classes with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who encouraged me to experience sound in a completely different way from the one that I was familiar with from the German Youth Orchestra, for example. As a student, too, I continued to take an interest in early music. When I joined the Philharmoniker, I was one of the few players who had a certain grounding in early music.

And what about Rainer Kussmaul?

As a professor at the Freiburg Conservatory, he had considerable experience of the Baroque violin, and is seen as the father of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra.

A promising niche: Baroque music performed on modern instruments with a historically informed style of playing

How did you go about finding the other members of your ensemble?

Rainer and I agreed that we had to enlist the services of the orchestra’s leading soloists – but also rank-and-file players willing to join us in this experiment. After a while some of these players realized this wasn’t for them. So at the start we had to make a few adjustments. But by 1998/99 we knew who’d be playing – and we had lift-off. For our first tour, our soloist line-up was almost the same as it is today for our thirtieth-anniversary season: Reinhold Friedrich, Albrecht Mayer and, as a sort of substitute for Rainer Kussmaul, Gottfried von der Goltz, who for many years has been the leader of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. This has created a wonderful sense of continuity extending over the last three decades.

You work regularly with musicians from the early music scene. Does this sort of collaboration benefit both parties?

As members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, we have learnt certain performance techniques from musicians who don't usually play in modern orchestras. These techniques include questions of Baroque style and phrasing and the art of ornamentation. Conversely, they have also learnt things from us that were less familiar to them as members of a Baroque orchestra. These aspects include a special aesthetic regarding the Berlin sound and precision in ensemble playing.

You’ve been successful from the very beginning. What’s your secret?

We have occupied a niche that promised from the outset to be successful: Baroque music performed on modern instruments with a historically informed style of playing. Back then there were either classical chamber orchestras that occasionally dabbled in Baroque music or Baroque ensembles performing on period instruments. We took a risk and decided to combine the two. Add to this the high playing standards of the Berliner Philharmoniker and the fabulous abilities of every single player and you get what you can see today.

We have always enjoyed discovering new things

How do you choose your programmes?

At the heart of each programme we feature one of the great Baroque composers: Bach, Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi and so on. This involves a degree of organisation that is already remarkable, since we also have to take account of the wishes of promoters and record labels. The Brandenburg Concertos have been the focus of our attention from the very outset, not least as a result of our very first project with Claudio Abbado. But we have always enjoyed discovering new things, including unknown works by Telemann, a composer who has recently enjoyed something of a revival. In short, our repertoire is a good mix of tried and tested classics with rarities that we hope will be a pleasant surprise for our audiences.

Do you have any personal preferences?

I love Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Telemann’s Tafelmusik. Telemann used to be dismissed as a composer who churned out music, but this is unjust: he wrote many works that are just as fantastic as those of Bach and Handel. Listeners should just approach his music in a more open-minded spirit.

What, for you, have been the highlights of the last thirty years?

There have been so many! Over the last thirty years we’ve given around five hundred concerts all over the world – in every major hall. Of course, the concerts in the Philharmonie in Berlin, which is our own living room, as it were, have always been particularly important to us. They are very close to our heart. But just as impressive have been the concerts in Suntory Hall, Carnegie Hall and the Elbphilharmonie. I  particularly remember concerts with Christine Schäfer and Frank Peter Zimmermann, and a performance of the Brandenburg Concertos in 2016, when Reinhard Goebel conducted us for the first time – by then Rainer Kussmaul was no longer with us.

When Rainer Kussmaul left, there must have been a huge gap…

Absolutely. Rainer was seriously ill. He fought against his illness for a long time, but in 2015, he finally had to give up. This marked the end of an era for us: the leading light of the Baroque Soloists retired and his pupils suddenly had to stand on their own two feet. Rainer had this incredible presence on the stage: as our leader he was as solid as a rock. He had a sure sense of the right tempo and a stoic sense of calm, and he brought authority to even the most demanding programmes.

With Reinhard Goebel, you were enlisted the services of another influential figure.

Yes, Reinhard Goebel took up the ideas that Rainer Kussmaul had formulated and continued to develop them in a new direction, more especially with regard to the repertoire. He has spent his whole life foraging in archives and unearthing works that no one previously knew. We were lucky enough to be able to make world-premiere recordings of many of the works he discovered in this way. This was his gift to us – as well as the fact that he was also a fantastic Baroque violinist. We string-players benefited enormously from his knowledge of historically informed performance practice.

Technical precision and a particular playfulness

What exactly did you string-players learn from Reinhard Goebel?

He brought us the total conviction that we need to have complete mastery over the technical aspects of string-playing: the left and right hand need to be perfectly coordinated. And then there is the question of tempi. For Reinhard Goebel there is nothing arbitrary about the tempi in Baroque music. Instead, they manifestly follow the rules that existed at that time, rules that consisted of tempo markings and metre. They must always be chosen in a way that makes sense.

How did your jubilee programme come about? It seems to me to be a perfect fit in terms of your ensemble’s history.

Yes, it is – and for several reasons. With the Second and Third Brandenburg Concertos we are returning to our beginnings. We performed the Second Brandenburg Concerto on our first major tour with almost the same soloists. And the Third? For us string-players, this is the most demanding of the set. It allows us to show what we’re capable of from a technical point of view. The programme is then completed by Telemann concertos  in which each of the soloists can shine as an individual. In this way we have come a full circle.

You may have come full circle, but the ensemble is still evolving. In what way?

From the very beginning there has been a very special ensemble spirit that was created in no small part by Rainer Kussmaul. However intense our work, Rainer was always able to introduce a certain note of relaxation thanks to his dry sense of humour. In addition to our technical precision, we also have our own particular form of playfulness. And this is very much something that we want to pass on to the next generation. Shortly before his death I promised Rainer that the Berliner Barock Soloisten would continue even when our founding members are no longer with us.

Do you have a vision for the future?

We’d like to continue to discover unjustly neglected works and also to venture into early Classicism and Classicism itself by drawing on larger resources. We’re planning to perform Mozart’s violin concertos, for example, but also works with keyboard – perhaps an early work by Beethoven. And we shall, of course, still try to work with great artists. I’m not worried about the future, because we have a lot of exciting projects lined up. But it’s also clear that the Berliner Philharmoniker will retain its central place in our lives. The musicians of the Berliner Barock Soloisten are happy to subordinate themselves to this greater cause, because without the Berliner Philharmoniker there’d be no Barock Soloisten.

What do you personally owe to the ensemble?

I owe them a very important part of my life. As their organizer I have spent thirty years in charge of a complicated world made up of very diverse artists and managed to keep them together even in times of crisis. But the Barock Soloisten have left their mark not only on my own life but also on that of my family. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting at my desk, working for the ensemble, and at the same time looking after my children. Not infrequently I’ve sorted out scores with my children, and the individual instrumental parts have got mixed up with building blocks, Lego pieces and stuffed animals before I could work out which parts belonged with which project. My children loved these games. So the Berliner Barock Soloisten remains a family project for me.