Why am I writing about a music event? Of course, the different arts converse with each other, utilizing the same principles of design, composition, and engagement. I don’t see a division between the various art disciplines.

Crescendo , an annual 16-day music festival, hosted by the Universität der Künste Berlin (University of the Arts Berlin), features highly-talented music students, as well as guest performers and faculty speakers.

The university is located only a few blocks from the apartment where my husband and I are staying during our Berlin stay, so it has been super-easy to just walk over to the performance hall in the evenings after dinner.

The festival could have been just a standard run of student recitals, but these 20-somethings were not there to mark time or trudge through a series of performances just to fulfill a course requirement. These instrumentalists brought virtuosity and fire to the stage. Whether the music was 17th or 20th century, the care, finesse and willingness to take risks on stage were there. In most of the performances, the musical lines connected, unifying phrases and movements into one fluid entity.

Composers ranged from Prokofiev, Debussy, Carl Philipp Emanual Bach, Richard Strauss, Brahms, Poulenc, Hindemith, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, and the founder of the music school, Joseph Joachim.

Last night’s concert, featuring a suite for cello and wind orchestra by Friedrich Guida. The piece moved from marching band, to abstraction, to blues, to minuet form. It sounds goofy, but the music carried its own authority and the reassembly of music formats and associations totally worked.

It was humbling and inspiring to witness the work these young people have put in order to come to this point. Some of them are absolutely ready for a career as soloists, some will get into orchestras, and some will go into teaching.

One performance we went to paired visual art students with the music performance. The visual artists painted on large canvases while the music students performed. I was really excited about what the visual artists would do. Granted, it’s not an easy to create paintings on the spot in front of an audience, but the contrast in the energy and focus of the music students and the visual art students was obvious. The music students were absolutely in 100%. The other students seemed to be on autopilot. I was kind of surprised at that, given that the standards seemed so high for the music students. In any case, it was interesting to see what the painters came up with.

Crescendo continues for another seven days, and I hope to take in more of these inspiring concerts!