Chamber music in the cold store: the “Intonations” festival returns

It wasn’t the end after all when “Intonations” took place for the last time in the Jewish Museum on Lindenstraße in April 2022 – in a remarkable atmosphere saturated with gratitude and melancholy. For ten years, the only festival in Berlin that is explicitly dedicated to chamber music enchanted the glass courtyard of the museum in the spring with this typical aura that regularly sets in here. Pianist and festival director Elena Bashkirova has a very large address book. She regularly invites musician friends over, who then like to extend the time frame of a concert: The focus is on the art, not the dinner. Husband Daniel Barenboim and Martha Argerich also performed.

After ten years it was over

But then: that’s it. Sponsor Evonik has committed itself to realigning its support every ten years, and the Jewish Museum itself – “Intonations” was originally created at the suggestion of founding director W. Michael Blumenthal – also pursued other priorities.

“But I always knew that it would go on,” says Elena Bashkirova in the living room of her house in Dahlem. Many voices would also have encouraged her not to give up, not to let the festival die. After several months of searching, she has now found a place where it will be revived, initially for just one day: the cold store at Gleisdreieck, built around 1900, with Brandenburg brick neo-Gothic on the outside and modern American steel skeleton construction on the inside.

“It was always clear that a classical concert hall was out of the question,” she explains. Because such a festival has to be different, it has to demonstrate externally that it interrupts the normal course of events. It needs a special place to work.

Bashkirova was immediately fascinated by the cold store and its brick industrial appearance, she says – it’s like looking at an apartment: “You have to trust the first moment and shouldn’t immediately start reflecting.” The center of the cold store is a cuboid hall with several tiers formed, which can be variably seated, the acoustics are excellent.

The architectural spatial experience has always played an important role in “Intonations” – also at the mother festival in Israel, the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival. There, the concerts have been heard for over 20 years in the auditorium of the Jerusalem YMCA, a modern yet mystical building from the early 20th century, which combines ornaments and symbolism of all three world religions concentrated in the Middle East and leads to a synthesis.

And of course the glass courtyard in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind in the form of a Jewish tabernacle, was always a special place, especially in the evenings when it was dark outside and light and music inside seduced the senses. It will be different in the cold store simply because there are no windows. However, the Glashof had another disadvantage: “We could only play in the spring. It’s too cold there in winter, and you can’t breathe in summer.”

Time was too short this year to find a new sponsor, so this year there will only be a one-day festival next Saturday June 10th, with two long concerts at 3pm and 7.30pm: sort of a hello, a housewarming party. Several days are then planned for 2024.

Longtime acquaintances perform, many of whom conveniently live in Berlin. Madeleine Carruzzo and Emmanuel Pahud are there, she is a violist and he is a flutist with the Berlin Philharmonic. But also debutants like the French pianist Nathalia Milstein, who studied with András Schiff at the Barenboim Said Academy.

Together with Emmanuel Pahud she will play a duo for flute and piano by Clara Schumann. Music from the Romantic period and from the early 20th century (including Elliot Carter) is the focus, the Viennese classic will only be represented with Schubert’s “Arpeggione” – played by Pahud and Elena Bashkirova themselves. And at the end, of course, as every year, the octet by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

Certain things, fortunately, don’t change. This also applies to Bashkirova’s “big” chamber music festival in Jerusalem in the fall. “The region is so full of drama and tragedy, but we’re just a constant, year after year,” she says with a touch of pride. This year – and then perhaps also in 2024 in Berlin – works by emigrants will form a program focus.

In view of the impending so-called “judicial reform” that the Israeli government is planning, she is pleased that the liberal, progressive part of the population has finally put aside its passivity and is standing up: “There are demonstrations every week, even now that the reform is supposedly on ice is laid. I think that’s great.” Sometimes it’s really good when something changes.