Berlin’s Classic Nightclubs

Berlin’s Berghain Club has received international press coverage by staging what’s hoped to become a regular night for live classical music.

The former power station hosted a show by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which played Schumann’s Violin Concerto and Mozart’s "Jupiter" Symphony, while clubbers knocked back beers and cocktails.

It was such a success that the idea, which goes by the name of Yellow Lounge, will rotate around Berlin’s coolest venues on the first Monday of each month.

"I am outside Cookies, a see-and-be-seen club on Friedrichstrasse that is hosting the next Yellow Lounge night," Helen Pidd wrote in the U.K.’s The Guardian, describing how a huge crowd of "hip young things" had begun queuing well before the doors opened.

Yellow Lounge organiser and DJ David Canisius, who spins classical records before and after the show, says the aim is to bring the genre to a different audience. Apart from being a keen clubber and trained barman, he’s also a violinist with the Deutsches Kammerorchester.

In the past few years, Cookies has promoted some of Berlin’s most memorable concerts: a saxophone quartet playing John Cage on the roof of a Communist-era tower block overlooking Alexanderplatz, and a pool party on the Badeschiff, a boat-turned- swimming pool moored on the River Spree.

Some have involved stars: Sting played his lute in the club Maria am Ostbahnhof, Rufus Wainwright and Neil Tennant did classical DJ sets at Cookies, and everyone from the French pianist Hélène Grimaud to the acclaimed New York-based Emerson String Quartet has appeared there.