BERLIN - Berlin's Holocaust memorial played host to an open-air concert on Friday, with musicians spread out across the field of concrete slabs and performing a modern experimental piece.
The Kammersymphonie Berlin twice performed composer Harald Weiss' sombre 17-minute piece "Vor dem Verstummen" ("Before Silence Falls") to mark the third anniversary of the monument's opening to the public.
The orchestra members were scattered among the 2,711 grey concrete slabs, against which some people leaned while listening to the music while others wandered around the labyrinthine memorial covering',000 square metres.
The idea was for every visitor to "hear and see something different," said Daniel-jan Girl, who helped organize the event.
Occasionally, the music was joined by sounds of police sirens or squawking birds.
"It forces you to concentrate on the music itself," said Anders Eklund, 41, from Stuttgart, praising the concept though he said the resulting sound was uneven depending on where one stood.
Conductor Lothar Zagrosek presided over the concert, which began just before sunset, with TV monitors set up to help the orchestra members follow him from around the memorial.
Weiss's work was scored for chamber orchestra and a solo mezzo-soprano, Tanja Simic. In discussing his approach to the piece, Weiss said: "the only thing more beautiful than music is silence."
Between the two performances Friday, German actress Tatjana Blacher recited poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a Jewish Holocaust victim whose German-language poetry was also used as the text in Weiss' composition. Meerbaum-Eisinger - a native of Czernowitz, then in Romania and now in Ukraine - was' when she died in December'42 at a Nazi SS labour camp at Mikhailovska.
The memorial, next to the Brandenburg Gate and Tiergarten Park, has become a key Berlin landmark, attracting more than eight million visitors since it opened on May 10, 2005.
It was designed by American architect Peter Eisenman and cost about $42 million to build. It is open 24 hours a day.
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