The coronavirus pandemic has forced the cancellation of most cultural events, including concerts. But two German orchestras found an intensely personal way to play on.
Patrick Kingsley, an international correspondent, and Laetitia Vancon, a photojournalist, are driving more than 3,700 miles to explore the reopening of the European continent after coronavirus lockdowns. Read all their dispatches.
Atop a hill beside a vineyard, a woman sat down a few yards from a stranger holding a double bass. She sat in silence for a minute, trying to hold his gaze.
It was hard looking him in the eye. She’d spent weeks staring at screens, largely in isolation. Human contact felt intense, strange. After 30 or 40 seconds, she glanced away.
But then the musician raised his bow. The air began to hum with the deep chords of the instrument. She began to relax.
He had picked a version of an English folk song — an adaptation of “Greensleeves.” She realized what it was, and its origins. In her reverie, it felt like an oblique homage to her time in England, where she had spent part of her life
She suddenly felt overwhelmed.
During two months of lockdown, her amateur choir practices had been canceled. A concert she’d planned to see had been postponed. But here on a hill above Stuttgart, a virtuoso musician was playing a piece — and only Claudia Brusdeylins, a 55-year-old publicist for a renewable energy research group, could hear it.
“I just felt recognized,” Ms. Brusdeylins said later.
To circumvent the restrictions enforced on society by the pandemic, cultural institutions have mostly turned to the internet. Museums have held online panels, theaters have streamed plays on their websites, and orchestras have uploaded their back catalogs.
Others held drive-in events. Actors in the Czech Republic performed to cars in a parking lot, as did musicians and DJs in Germany. And as the lockdown eases, a few are beginning to hold concerts in concert halls again, with large gaps between members of the audience.
But two state-funded orchestras in Stuttgart — the Stuttgart State Orchestra and the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra — are trying to do something more personal.
