PERSONAL NOTE: BERLIN

Personal Note is a concert series conceived, curated, and performed by the students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie’s Concert Curation course. Under the direction of Prof. Yael Kareth, the course empowers young musicians to connect performance with storytelling, audience engagement, and cultural relevance. Participants are invited to rethink the concert as a social and cultural space, exploring what it can communicate and how it can resonate today, while refining their own artistic voices. Questions such as “What story do I want to tell with my music?”, “For whom is it meant?”, or “What kind of aesthetic and emotional experience do I wish to create?” are at the heart of the process. The result is a series of concerts in an intimate, open atmosphere that fosters a genuine connection between performers and audience.

This season’s series is dedicated to the theme “Musical Metropolises.” Four concerts focus on the cities of Vienna, Paris, New York, and Berlin—places with a rich musical history and a vibrant present. The programs explore composers, musicians, and movements from different eras that have shaped the cultural heritage of these cities, emerging from a process of collaboration in which the students contribute their individual perspectives and creative voices.

Program 4: Berlin

The final concert in the series is a portrait of a city seen through the eyes of those who arrived in it as strangers. The students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie have each chosen pieces that represent their experience in Berlin alongside music from home that carries new meaning in the context of their lives here. The result is something intimate and collective at once: a musical diary of displacement, discovery, and the slow process of finding belonging in an unfamiliar place. Through the European Romantic tradition, music from the Middle East and beyond, traditional songs, and original compositions, this concert asks what it means to carry your identity across borders—and what happens to that identity when it meets a new city that evokes a rich spectrum of emotions. Berlin has been many things to many people. In this program it is seen through the eyes of these musicians, at this particular moment in their lives, as part of an individual and collective journey toward home.