Thirty Minutes of Heaven

Sacred music in Berlin's historic churches offers another opportunity to hear great music for free. One of the most beautiful weekly series is the NoonSong every Saturday at 12:00 noon at the Kirche am Hohenzollernplatz.

Sirventes

Eight professional singers who call themselves Sirventes render heavenly harmonies, mostly Renaissance and sometimes Romantic choral music, embedded in a thirty-minute sung liturgy. On Saturday, May 9, Sirventes performed choral music by J.H. Schein and Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

Just outside the church, at the Hohenzollern Platz, the weekly market is in full swing. Asparagus is in season, as are strawberries, and bunches of lilacs sit in tubs of water at the flower stalls. Inside, the sound of fruit sellers' calls ebbs away as shoppers, their baskets still trailing green asparagus tips and pollen smudges from lilies, settle meditatively  in their pews. The first notes of Dubois' Toccata ring out from the organ loft.

NoonSong

Sirventes is led by Stefan Schuck, professor of choral music at the Universität der Künste, and NoonSong is his brainchild. The inspiration for the NoonSong liturgy, he explains, comes from  the "Stundengebet" or liturgy for the hour, practiced as long ago as the fifth century in the Benedictine tradition.

"The aim of NoonSong," Schuck says, "is to weave together the beauty of the liturgy with the beauty of the music and the text, and to open the heart and ear of the listener. NoonSong embeds the music in its original context, so it is at once concert and liturgy. This is what makes it a different experience from, say, a concert in the Kammermusiksaal in the Philharmonie."

Weekly performances of NoonSong will continue till the end of May, but after that, its future is uncertain. Lack of funds makes the project difficult to sustain, and it may have to cut back on the number of performances. It would be a shame if this beautiful Berlin tradition were to die out.

Performances are every Saturday at 12:00 till the end of May, and entrance is free although you can give a donation at the door to support the project. The Kirche am Hohenzollernplatz is at U Hohenzollernplatz (exit: Düsseldorferstr). 

The last of the regular weekly performances (May 30) will feature choral works by Kenneth Leighton, Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schütz.

More information is at www.noonsong.de