Zone of Exclusivity

One day all of this could have been yours: the 21^st International Chamber Music Festival under the direction of Elena Bashkirova opened in Jerusalem’s  YMCA, a fancy three-winged – or shall I say, triune – building of eclectic architecture. For aliens from Tel-Aviv, the truly unusual structure with a belfry tower in the art deco style and pseudo-antique porticos is located near Montefiore Windmill, in the very heart of the Old City. You can easily get there by Via Dolorosa, at least yesterday that would have been quite appropriate as the second part of the Festival’s opening concert – where Gidon Kremer opened up to the public such de profundis that mere mortals cannot fathom, – in a sense repeated Christ’s bitter dolorous journey to Golgotha.

The charming Art Director of the Festival, Elena Bashkirova, arranged a dramatically consistent program – from cute salon music-making in the spirit of Schubertiades (the concert, btw, did open with Schubert) to a heart-rending tragedy of the Shakespearean calibre. It was impressive how sounds changed clothes: Mendelssohn’s “Seven Songs Without Words” played duet by Bashkirova and Bronfman were clad in frilled gauze dresses, cuffed trousers and redingotes, snow-white starched collars adding to the music even more elegance and decorum. Unlike other songs by Mendelssohn, “...oder soll es Tod bedeuten?” performed with utmost finesse by young musicians of the Modigliani Quartet and soprano Anna Samuil that  turned out to be cut very differently – sombre German esthetician Aribert Reimann changed them into a very eclectic attire to match his own music. The eight songs, which this time found their human voice, were linked to one another with the help of intermezzi, or, if you wish, with instrumental retournelles in which Reimann tried to reinterpret Mendelssohn’s idioms – with reference to the thematic material of the original and to our time. It ended up being something along the lines of Finnegans Wake – no harm meant to the admirers of James Joyce and Henri Volokhonsky, – some unconditionally conditional music with its dissonances incorporating all the negatively charged emotions of the century  in its third decade in number, as is the JCMF – so it figures.

The evening peaked with the historic – no exaggeration here – performance of  Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No 2 in E minor in memory of Sollertinsky, a prayer, a requiem service from hand-picked artists: pianist Yefim Bronfman, violinist Gidon Kremer, and cellist Giedre Dirvanauskaite, when from the very first flageolet tones it became clear that each of the three is in the zone of exclusivity. Each of the three musicians has their own temple and their own parish, which makes their ensemble, their seamless mutual understanding ever so surprising and valuable. They put on Shostakovich’s incredibly tragic music a tight jacket of drained-empty time so that they could tell the tale of life in the presence of death. Death whose songs and dances vacillate between falsely importunate ostinato, scherzo, or passacaglia. Invisible in the first part, Death throws off his Cap of Invisibility in the second and is seen clad in almost nothing, the epitome of nothingness.  Silence is deafening there, as deafening as piano; it gets under the surface of sounds which sometimes are no more than just implied. The silence grows into the final dance a la freilach composed by Shostakovich with such amazing authenticity that it needs to be wearing a lapserdak and yarmulke. It is shaping up imperceptibly, out of the whisper of magician Bronfman’s piano to continue with Kremer’s klezmer violin and to finally become as obvious as it is as incredible. Both seem to be engaging with Shostakovich’s music almost physiologically getting across to the audience their personal / impersonal attitude to it. A snap, a loud moan, a bacchanalia, and agonising extinction – the inner rhymes of music making the listener privy to what comes after. Up until the very last moment of silence you can’t but be fascinated by the idea of how musically beautiful suffering may be.

Shostakovich, who eventually resisted what was nicknamed “inner emigration” in Soviet time, greatly valued the music of Mieczysław Weinberg, his follower albeit not a formal student. Likewise, Gidon Kremer, a noble-minded intellectual, a phenomenal violinist, the last of the Mohicans with an amazing smile trying to change the world for the better.  After the intermission, 24 cello “Preludes to a Lost Time” originally written for Rostropovich were played by Kremer arranged by him for the violin and were accompanied by his video installation made up of the photos of the 1960 by Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus. Kremer gave a name to each of those fragile and piercingly sad preludes and combined them into a fairly unusual form – the photos fade in and out on the screen behind the soloist at a very precise time – here killing the moment, there reflecting the moment’s time-and-music-imprinted status.  

Weinberg was the son-in-law of Solomon Mikhoels (a famous Soviet Jewish actor killed by the Soviet regime) and was indirectly involved in Stalin’s “case of the physicians,” which put him on the crossroads of two Viae Dolorose of the Stalinist times. The self-perception of a composer and a Soviet person of the 60-s surrounded with barbed wire and dragging himself along to his Golgotha literally enveloped the listeners making them revise their attitude to the cultural memory. In Sutkus’ photos that memory is ground into the horror of human meat, every image talking to the music which Kremer dedicated to “all those who suffered pain and violence.” A well-tuned ear will catch quotations from Shostakovich, Mozart and Schumann, also one from Weinberg’s own opera “The Passenger,” a landmark piece for Weinberg himself. A well-trained eye might spot the ghost of Bach in the shadow of the miniature sarabande.

Gidon Kremer turned out to be an insightful stage director – he managed to render the idea of denial of freedom, the feeling of fear, the impending despair of a huge empire moving to its end. Transpiring on the black screen, however, are also numerous photos of serious and happy Soviet children – wasn’t the USSR a country of joyful and happy childhood, which comrade Stalin and his successors were to be thanked for? The lowest and highest registers engage in Kremer’s ‘imaginary dialogues,” lyrical melodies clash with dry pizzicato. Notwithstanding, there is something encouraging, you know, about this organically construed past. 

Photo: Dan Porges