Last night on PBS we had a mishmash of a program called Berlin in Lights. In fact, we saw highlights from the recent Berlin in Lights festival at Carnegie Hall that gave no sense of what the festival was all about.

The major work was Mahler’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic. Rattle is without a doubt one of the great conductors and one of the great animateurs of our time. The Mahler was a finely prepared and inspired performance. The orchestra was superb.

In this Karajan 100^th anniversary year one might ask if the orchestra is as good as it was under Karajan. My guess is that man for man or woman it is probably better. I would go further to suggest that in Claudio Abbado his immediate successor and in Simon Rattle, Abbado’s successor in turn, the BPO musicians have made the wisest possible choices of music directors. Abbado suffered only because at the time he took over the classical record market all but collapsed and the profile of both orchestra and conductor suffered as a result. Illness also overtook Abbado and forced him to cut back his conducting activities. But he remains along with Rattle among the few conductors who can truly galvanize orchestras and audiences the way Karajan did in his era.

By the way, the Berlin Philharmonic we saw and heard last night has only a handful of musicians in the ranks who played under Karajan, and none of the principal players. It has been almost nineteen years since Karajan’s death and the present Berlin Philharmonic is vastly different. Its members are younger and there are now almost as many women as men, especially in the strings.

Music lovers with long memories will recall that in Karajan’s later years he and the musicians of the BPO had a number of acrimonious disputes. One of them concerned Karajan’s support for Sabine Meyer as a new addition to the orchestra as principal clarinet. She was to be the first woman to join the band. But like their colleagues in the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin players were bitter end chauvinists and Meyer was kept out. Only years later, as new and younger musicians joined the orchestra did attitudes change. In Vienna they have hardly changed at all. The Vienna Philharmonic still has only one or two female players.

In addition to the Mahler Ninth we had excerpts from a remarkable Le sacre du printemps with Rattle and the BPO in the pit in New York and on stage young people from a variety of area schools dancing their hearts out. Rattle as thinker out of the box.

Finally, we had a tantalizing look at the latest conducting sensation, the young Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel. He led his Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. The playing was remarkable from musicians so young and Dudamel showed both technique and charisma. No wonder the Los Angeles Philharmonic hired him to succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen. The Berlin connection? Rattle has become something of a mentor for Dudamel and he and members of the BPO have been traveling regularly to Caracas to work with the Venezuelan students.

We hear a lot about President Chavez, his anti-American posturing and his friendship with Fidel Castro. We need to hear more about the vast system (El Sistema) of music education that has produced Dudamel and the members of his orchestra. And Dudamel has another mentor too: Claudio Abbado. With the serious health problems of the past ten years Abbado has cut back his activities but he has also been advised by his doctors to avoid cold weather. So he spends the winter in Caracas and during that period often works with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra.

The Berlin in Lights festival was a fiasco as a television broadcast, even if some of the content was wonderful, and something must be done about the awful sound quality of these broadcasts. In some parts of the country I understand that PBS is broadcasting in HD. But in Austin, Texas on Direct TV (satellite) the audio is horrible, especially so in classical music telecasts because the dynamic range is so much greater than in talk programs or in such standard PBS fare as The Lawrence Welk Show.

In brief, the problem is this. In order to make the station’s signal available to as large a geographical area as possible – the more people who can receive the station, the more donors during fundraising programs – the station’s engineers set the transmitter’s limiters in such a way that 1) there is no excessive volume to cause the signal to bleed into signals from other stations, and 2) there are no times when the music gets so quiet that it disappears into static and interference, or gives the channel-surfing listener the impression there is no signal at all.

What this means for classical music broadcasts is that there will never be any powerful climaxes nor will there be any ethereal and breathtaking pianissimos. Worse than that, during fortissimos the brass will be audibly scaled back and during quiet solos instruments will suddenly jump out at you. The Berlin Philharmonic Mahler performance was full of such moments, especially in the fragmented final bars, and to my ears effectively destroyed the performance Rattle and his musicians had worked so hard to create. And again, this was not a matter of a poor feed from PBS headquarters or incompetent engineering; it was a matter of policy and that policy has been eviscerating classical music events on PBS (and other networks) for decades.

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