Berlin's Holocaust memorial hosts open-air concert of experimental work

By: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BERLIN - Berlin's Holocaust memorial was playing host Friday to an open-air concert with musicians spreading out across a field of concrete slabs to perform a modern experimental piece.

The performance by the Kammersymphonie Berlin of composer Harald Weiss'new piece "Vor dem Verstummen" ("Before Silence Falls") was being held to mark the third anniversary of the monument's opening to the public.

The orchestra was to be scattered among the memorial's 2,711 grey concrete slabs.

Conductor Lothar Zagrosek was to preside over the early-evening concert from the centre of the 19,000 square-metre monument. Television monitors were to be used to enable the musicians, up to 50 metres away, to see him.

"We tested it and it worked fantastically," said Daniel-Jan Girl, who helped organize the event. "Every visitor will hear and see something different."

Weiss's work is scored for chamber orchestra and a solo mezzo-soprano, Tanja Simic. He said of the piece's approach that "the only thing more beautiful than music is silence."

Weiss based the new work on a poem by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a native of Czernowitz, then in Romania and now in Ukraine, who died in December 1942 at a Nazi SS labour camp at Mikhailovska.

Located adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate and the Tiergarten park, the striking Holocaust memorial has quickly become a key Berlin landmark - attracting more than eight million visitors since its inauguration on May 10, 2005.

Designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial cost about $42 million to build. The site is open to the public around the clock.