Different venue, tried and tested festival: “Intonations”, Berlin’s only chamber music weekend, will take place for the second time in the Kühlhaus am Gleisdreieck, from June 7 to 9, after moving from the Jewish Museum.
It will open on Friday at 7.30 p.m. with Antonín Dvořák’s “Slavonic Dances” and works by Arnold Schönberg, who was forced into American exile, and the composer Hans Krása, who was murdered in Auschwitz. The musicians include the festival founder and pianist Elena Bashkirova, the violinist Michael Barenboim and the bassist René Pape.
This year, the concert series with five events over three days is dedicated to “Musical Migration”. Works by composers who left their homeland, whether for political, religious or artistic-professional reasons, were selected.
For example, Beethoven and Brahms went from Germany to the dream city of Vienna, from which Gustav Mahler was later driven out by Jew-haters. George Enescu from Romania and Stravinsky from Russia were repeatedly drawn to Paris, where the ballet avant-garde gathered, among others. On Saturday, Stravinsky’s suite from “L’Histoire du Soldat” is on the “Intonations” program.
In addition to Schönberg, the persecuted Jewish composers honored by the festival with performances include Hanns Eisler, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Ernest Bloch. They all emigrated to America, sometimes by a roundabout route – and were often unhappy there. And the musicians at this year’s “Intonations” edition include the pianists Elisabeth Leonskaja and Igor Levit, the Philharmonic’s principal flutist Emmanuel Pahud and the soprano Dorothea Röschmann.
Once again, the Berlin Chamber Music Festival, founded in 2012 as a sister event to the Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival, ends on Sunday evening with Mendelssohn’s E-flat major octet, op. 20. Because the composer, who commutes between Berlin and Leipzig, is a “restless traveler, a wanderer between worlds,” it says in the program booklet. (Tsp)