Beethovenfest Celebrates Subversive Music
Israeli-Palestinian piano duo Amal performed Russian classics alongside contemporary works by Israeli and Palestinian composers to highlight the political aspect of their show.
Published: October 3, 2012 (Issue # 1729)
BEETHOVENFEST
The Ensemble Spinario joined forces with the Members of Freyer Ensemble for a performance that included theater.
“Art Has a Mind of Its Own”: The motto of this year’s Beethovenfest, which ends on Oct. 7 in Bonn, is the kind of thought that could easily have come from the U.S. composer John Cage, renowned for his unorthodox use of musical instruments in search of a new sound. It is revealing that the centennial of the birth of the eccentric composer was one of the key events of this year’s Beethoven festival.
Titled “In the Bird Cage,” the Cage Night celebrated the composer’s philosophy through a series of performances running concurrently in the halls of three museums that are at the heart of Bonn’s Museum Mile: The Bundeskunsthalle Forum, the Haus der Geschichte and the Kunstmuseum.
“There is hardly anything that Beethoven and Cage share or have in common yet the Cage Night could not be more at home at the Beethoven festival,” said French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who took part in the project, contributing a performance of Pierre Boulez’s piano sonatas numbers 1 and 3.
“Both composers were daring innovators — each of them in their own way — who had the courage to go against the grain. And they were both way ahead of their time.
“Any definition that one would try to give Cage, the man who rejected the concept of music and sounds serving purposes of creativity, would constrict him, and it was actually the composer’s intention to push boundaries rather than to be squeezed into any definitions,” he added.
The prestigious festival was first held on what would have been Beethoven’s 75th birthday in 1845 (he died in 1827 aged 57) and had Franz Liszt as its first artistic director.
BEETHOVENFEST
The night of the Beethovenfest devoted to John Cage saw musical and theater performances in three Bonn museums.
The city of Bonn perceives Beethoven as its top “brand,” as do the festival’s heavyweight sponsors. That allows the festival to run for a month, featuring 60 concerts by some of the world’s most distinguished musicians.
During its history, Beethovenfest has built up a dedicated, open-minded and curious audience receptive to new ideas, such as incorporating other musical genres, from jazz to hip-hop, into the programs of some of Europe’s most venerable classical music events.
There was far more to the Cage Night than pieces by Cage himself. The Israeli-Palestinian piano duo Amal, which translates into English as “Hope,” performed Russian classics alongside groundbreaking contemporary works by emerging Israeli and Palestinian composers to highlight the political aspect of their performance. The title of their concert, “Ignoring Boundaries” could easily have served as a second motto for the whole festival.
“Coming together on stage, we are making not only an artistic but also a political statement; we want to say, look, art can overcome national borders and political argument alike,” said pianist Yaron Kohlberg, one of the Amal duo.
The two musicians share a dream of performing in Israel and in Arab countries, but their first engagement of the kind — a concert in Qatar — was canceled earlier this year because of high security concerns.
The Cage Night featured a total of eight shows, and the schedule allowed audiences, if they so wished, to compare drastically different renditions of the composer’s pieces.
BEETHOVENFEST
Actress and singer Salome Kammer performed a tongue-in-cheek rendition of Cage’s music in the foyer of Haus der Geschichte.
The Ensemble Spinario and four actors from the Members of Freyer Ensemble threw a challenge both to themselves and the audience by choosing a selection of sobering cerebral works by the German artist Anselm Kiefer — who shares the philosophy that “art is not entertainment and it has to be difficult” — as a backdrop to their performance. Kiefer’s dark works did not overwhelm Ensemble Spinario’s show, but added an eerie feel to it, which far from being a disadvantage, rather added to the unorthodox rendition of the composer’s “Song Books.” The musicians brought contemporary dance, theater, acrobatics and pantomime to spice up the engaging show, with the actors throwing dice, knitting, tuning a portable radio and pushing each other around in a wheelbarrow.
Actress Salome Kammer brought humor and charisma to her tongue-in-cheek rendition of Cage’s music. She performed in the foyer of Haus der Geschichte, a venue that she shared with four musicians: Steffen Schleiermacher (piano), Andreas Seidel (violin), Friedrich Gauwerky (cello) and Stefan Hussong (accordion). The use of space and the venue’s acoustics was formidable, and the ensemble made a winning decision to place the musicians in different parts of the hall to enhance the trick of toying with the acoustics.
Beethovenfest is not new to the format of a night dedicated to a particular composer: In 2011, the event featured a romantic Liszt Night, and the genre of honoring composers looks set to continue. Reflecting on the Cage Night, which took place on Sept 15, Ilona Schmiel, director of Beethovenfest, said the “In the Bird Cage” experiment had brought a new wave of audiences to the festival.
“Half of the people in the halls I had not seen before, and this means that the new ways of listening to music resonate with a greater share of the public,” Schmiel said. “At the festival, we are always looking for new ways to open up the audience.”
Schmiel said the festival would be sure to employ the tactic of holding themed concerts in museums in the future, and also explore the format of arranging a series of venues between which the audience could circulate freely throughout the evening.
When Schmiel took charge of the festival in 2004 and scheduled some contemporary music, there were noticeably fewer people in the auditoriums than in previous years. The festival manager and her team were not discouraged, however, and their efforts soon began to pay off. At present, the Beethovenfest can easily incorporate the world premiere of a new work in its programs, and the halls are sure to be packed.
“We live in the 21st century and we cannot just stick to the past, dully repeat old works and pretend that no talented music has emerged since,” said Schmiel. “That would be cowardice, and will not take us anywhere. I always felt obliged to include new music in the programs, indeed, in the name of Beethoven who was always ahead of his time.”