4. ForumKonzert Choral Evensong

The RIAS Kammerchor Berlin’s ForumKonzerte have been a tremendous success story. The series was founded in 2004 by the Forum der Freunde und Förderer with the idea of being able to experience the choir, or small groups of individual members of the choir, at unaccustomed locations in the city. Besides the unusual concert framework, the ForumKonzerte’s special feature is in particular that the programmes invariably originate from the choir, and are realised jointly with various musical partners and the venue. In this way, in the past 22 years the RIAS Kammerchor has tapped more than 80 new “stages” in Berlin – including museums, former municipal bathhouses in Lichtenberg and Wedding, a crematorium, engine sheds, the Ökowerk in Grunewald and other public buildings. These special performances are very popular with the audience.

In this season, the settings of the ForumKonzerte are four Berlin “facade churches”, meaning sacral buildings that are integrated into a street’s row of houses. This building type was deployed very frequently during the imperial age in Berlin, particularly for Catholic churches, for which, in the wake of the Kulturkampf under Bismarck, no building permits were granted on open squares. Apart from this external commonality, the four churches selected for the ForumKonzerte have great architectonic diversity in their interiors: the Bekenntniskirche in Treptow (1931) is an aisle-less church in the expressionist style; the Stadtkloster Segen in the Prenzlauer Berg district (1908) is impressive with its very high interior space. The Rosenkranz-Basilika in Steglitz (1900) is completely in neo-Byzantine style with many mosaics, and the Kirche St. Afra in Wedding (1898) represents the neo-Gothic sacral architecture so typical of Berlin.