Raimar Orlovsky: If I weren’t a musician …

  Raimar Orlovsky: If I weren’t a musician …  

In this series, we introduce members of the Berliner Philharmoniker and their passions beyond music. This time, violinist Raimar Orlovsky, takes us onto the waterways around Berlin, where boating offers a welcome escape from the pace of everyday life. 

Herbert von Karajan loved speed on land, at sea and in the air. He personally piloted his twin-engine business jet, a Dassault Falcon 10, drove Ferraris, Porsches and a Mercedes 300 SL, and sailed the world’s oceans aboard the »Helisara VI« (mast height: 30 metres). As recently as 1982, he won the Giraglia Regatta from Toulon to San Remo with the yacht, which had been designed by the renowned Germán Frers. More recently, however, the »Helisara VI« made headlines for rather different reasons when she ran aground off the coast of Formentera during a severe storm in August 2024. She has remained stranded there ever since; but that is another story.

For Herbert von Karajan, sport was always about speed and perfection. When Raimar Orlovsky contemplates boating, however, he thinks less about speed and more about slowing down. “Out on the water, I can switch off completely within just a few minutes,” explains the musician, who has been a member of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s second violin section since September 1991. “It is pure relaxation for me when I can explore the waterways around Berlin in our small motorboat.”

Raimar Orlovsky’s musical talent runs in the family. He has been playing the violin since the age of five and has four siblings, two of whom also became professional musicians. He studied with Herbert Koloski, Werner Heutling, Thomas Brandis and Walter Forchert and performed with various ensembles, including the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

His love of watersports also has family roots. His father-in-law, Heinz-Henning Perschel, who himself played violin with the Berliner Philharmoniker from 1971 until his retirement in 2006, owned a small boat and occasionally took Raimar Orlovsky on excursions. It was therefore only natural that he eventually got his own boating licence. For him, time on the water is about slowing down and embracing a simpler way of life. “Boating is a bit like a camping holiday,” he says. Although his boat offers enough space for two people, it is not a luxury vessel. But that is precisely what appeals to him: shifting down a gear, finding peace and quiet, and enjoying the landscape and nature.

From May to September, Raimar Orlovsky and his family try to spend as much of their free time as possible on the boat. This is not always easy, however, because he has another passion that keeps him busy. Orlovsky is one of the founding members of the Berliner Barock Solisten, an ensemble of members of the Berliner Philharmoniker founded in 1995 and devoted to the performance of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music. He serves as its organiser and managing director. “As a child and teenager, I was very interested in Baroque music,” he recalls. “I attended courses with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who introduced me to a completely different musical sound world from the one I had experienced, for example, in the German National Youth Orchestra. During my studies, I also immersed myself deeply in early music.”

Last December, the Berliner Barock Solisten celebrated their thirtieth anniversary with a widely acclaimed concert. Does he have a favourite Baroque composer? “I love Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Telemann’s Tafelmusik. Telemann was often dismissed as being too prolific. But that does him an injustice, because, like Bach and Handel, he wrote truly magnificent works.”

But back to boating. “The network of rivers and lakes around Berlin is unique in Europe,” Raimar Orlovsky explains. “It even attracts watersports enthusiasts from France and Switzerland.” 

He understands that all too well. It makes him think of an unusual car park on Potsdam’s Tiefen See: “The Aldi store in Potsdam’s Berliner Vorstadt district even has moorings for twelve boats!”