Departure Day of a tour never gets portrayed properly in the brochures. For many in each group, it starts with a brutally early hotel pickup for travel to the airport. No one likes it, of course, but if the goal is to connect to a non-stop flight back to the States, the first step has to be a sunrise flight from Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Dubrovnik, Cologne, Vilnius, Moscow, Zurich, etc., that will get you early enough to a transatlantic flight out of Frankfurt, Munich, London, or Paris.

To catch such a sunrise flight, alas, one must leave the hotel at 4:00 a.m. or even 3:30. And not everyone arrives for a tour expecting to do that! But this time, our schedule is more gracious. Our luggage will be set out of our rooms for loading at 4:30 a.m. and we will leave the hotel at 5:00. We even get a breakfast box!

Tired or not, all should be in good spirits. We’re taking a lot good memories home. Many of the guests had specific, now fulfilled, reasons for taking this tour: several were in military service in Germany during the late 1950s or 1960s. Others last visited Berlin when war damage was still apparent or when West Berlin lay in physical isolation behind to the Berlin Wall. They wanted to see how things looked today in a reunited Berlin.

For yes, even though we tend to think of East Berlin as the city that was cut off, actually West Berlin was the place cut off. After all, Berlin was surrounded by East Germany and that territory bordered other Soviet-bloc countries. It was the Western sectors of Berlin (French, American, British) that were surrounded not just by the famous Wall at Brandenburg Gate, but by a complete ring of wall-and-death-strip all the way around, making West Berlin a kind of free bubble in the middle of Soviet-occupied territory.

My older folks know this well. Some even recall as children following the air lift that flew a plane a minute across those walls for nearly a year in 1948-49. That airlift kept West Berlin supplied despite the Soviet blockade of all roadways and rail lines into the city. Many more of us remember the Wall, and its sudden fall in November 1989. Either way, spending a full week embracing the glittering new Berlin has proved to be delightful.

I was undecided as to which final experience to share with you. Should I describe walking to the Brandenburg Gates, sauntering through the lush Tiergarten, taking a canal cruise on the Spree, or enjoying a full day in the astonishing collections of art on Museum Island? Maybe I could describe our enlightening tour of the Reichstag or the comprehensive back-stage tour we were privileged to take at the Berlin State Opera.

I might have written about these, but something else happened Monday evening.

You can see where it happened in the pictures. The building looks like a former machine shop and sits pretty far out in a neighborhood in the north part of Berlin.

And what is inside? Pianos. Pianos everywhere. Pianos pushed to the side, shoved catty-corner up onto a multi-part hand-cobbled stage, and tucked into the corners. The “concert hall” is known officially as Piano Salon Christophori, a play on the owner’s first name—Christoph—and the Italian inventor Bartolomeo Cristofori who gets credit for creating the earliest fortepianos (pianos) around 1600.

The force behind this “concert hall” is a Berliner named Christoph Scheiber. He fell in love with pianos gradually, each one discovered and collected as his newest “baby.” Through the help of a loyal, resourceful coterie of friends, his collection gradually turned into a venue for first-rate performances of primarily Classical music.

He stages close to 200 performances here each year. A serious crowd of music lovers attends them, paying a modest ticket price—sometimes just a donation only. The price includes open seating and access to a variety of beverages which one can freely take and drink as though visiting the house of a friend. The atmosphere resembles a relaxed party far more than a formal concert.

Most of the programs feature piano repertoire: after all, the place is stacked with pianos, many perched on their sides awaiting restoration. (We were told that Herr Scheiber takes in pianos the way other people take in stray dogs.) He has apparently never met a piano he doesn’t like.

And our evening certainly illustrated his love of the piano. We heard a wonderful performance by Berlin pianist Hinrich Alpers, primarily a performer, but also a professor at three music schools in Berlin, including the Hans Eisler Music School and the Barenboim-Said Academy. Alpers playing is what I like to call “real playing”: not the solely mechanical or highly polished virtuosity that arises from spending one’s life entirely in a practice room (e.g., the high-speed flashy technique we hear these days so often in competitions or on highly engineered recordings).

Instead, Alpers grabbed the bull by the horns and conveyed the blood and guts of Beethoven’s middle-period musical language through the lens of five sonatas: Opus 54, Opus 57 (Appasionata), Opus 78 & 79, and Opus 81 81a (Les Adieux).

If I were not facing such an early flight, I’d write more about these pieces. But the clock is ticking and it’s nearly time to board the bus to the airport. (Maybe Hank will include one as a Friday Performance Pick.)

So I’ll summarize: Alpers’ playing presented a middle-aged Beethoven working with the passion, focus, and increasing musical innovation that characterizes this intense period of the composer’s life. Not all of these five sonatas are masterpieces (he is performing the whole cycle of Beethoven, so these happen to be the ones we heard Monday night). But each reveals something about the musical problems Beethoven was solving in works from this period

It couldn’t have been better—hearing these pieces in such a visceral, colorful  performing space, absorbing the fact that the entire operation has come about because of one man’s love man of pianos. We all left the concert uplifted.

And then, as life sometimes does, we had an encore of a different type of virtuosity. Once we boarded the bus that had waited next to the building to take us back to the Hilton, it became clear that this big vehicle could no longer drive down the quaint, narrow the street to leave the neighborhood. During the concert, enough local residents had returned home and parked their cars along the lane. The street was clogged. (You probably know how Europeans park on their sidewalks.) There simply was no space left for the bus to make the requisite turn.

You had to be there to see why this situation was so entertaining, but imagine a frustrated bus driver, an elegant Mercedes bus, a group of people very happy about the music they’ve heard, but still eager to get back to the hotel and rest up for the next long day of touring, and add to it a bevy of neighborhood folks coming out of the building to help figure out the painstakingly tiny geometrical adjustments our bus driver ultimately had to make to free the bus.

We did get out (it took about 25 minutes). And we carried on happily. What more can one wish from a trip to Berlin?