Exile as a biography and creative condition
The 11th Mizmorim Chamber Music Festival took place from January 29 to February 2 in Basel and Baselland. The theme of "Exile" once again turned it into a cycle of active remembrance. A cross-section can be heard on SRF 2 on March 20.
Due to current developments, the topic of "exile" gained relevance far beyond Basel - also through the biographies of the musical personalities presented, who fled the Holocaust or died in concentration camps in Germany. "Exile" became tangible as a "celebration of the diverse encounters between Jewish music and Western art music", and inevitably also the extremely sensitive membrane between critical competence and anti-Semitism.
A good example of the knowledge and awareness processes initiated was the Late Night Concert by pianist Denis Linnik, a recipient of the Mizmorim Young Talent Grant. In the Teufelhof, he played the Burlesques op. 31 by Ernst Toch, long forgotten after his American exile, a Intermezzo by Arthur Lourié, who positioned himself between Scriabin and Stravinsky, and the early sonata by Leo Ornstein, who presumably died in 2002 at the age of 106. Such discoveries are the energy and ambition of the Mizmorim Festival. The compositions revealed different creative qualities.
In addition to established concert venues such as the Druckereihalle Ackermannshof, concerts were held in the Kunsthalle Baselland, which opened in 2024. With the exception of the launch concert in Zurich, this was the first time the Mizmorim Festival had been held outside of Basel.
Curator Erik Petry from the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Basel, whose students included Mizmorim director Michal Lewkowicz, is particularly interested in linking program design to the history of the 20th century. Barbara Häne, also a Petry alumna, summed up after her tour of "Exile in Switzerland" at the Jewish Museum Basel: "Anti-Semitism does not end at the border." In this respect, an appreciation and localization of the Mizmorim Festival based solely on criteria of interpretation and the quality of compositions is definitely not possible, always including global migrations of Jews and regional factors. At least this applies to the compositions written before the millennium. The composition competition for the 2026 festival, supervised by violinist Ilya Gringolts with the motto "Jerusalem", looks to the future, as do the concerts especially for young audiences.
Revered opening evening
There was little success with the performance composer Janiv Oron. His main contribution was announced as a world premiere at the opening of the festival in the Musiksaal of the Stadtcasino. The rude piece Histoire du soldat by the long stateless Russian exile Igor Stravinsky proved to be a striking interface to the Mizmorim motto. Oron's sound designs, however, inflated the small cast with reverberation effects and clouded over the finale of Stravinsky, a cosmopolitan who was not entirely blameless with regard to anti-Semitism.
The Swiss Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz transferred the fairy tale from the Russian Afanasyev collection to his home country in 1917 and arranged it for three speaking roles, a dancer and a chamber ensemble with an exposed violin (ideal part for Ilya Gringolts). In 1975, the new building of the Theater Basel opened with the German translation by Mani Matter, which was also used for the Mizmorim performance. No director was named for the semi-staged performance, in which the stalls remained empty for a long catwalk and the audience looked down from the balcony at the enervating island situation of the princess and the soldier who had married her. The profound introduction by Heidy Zimmermann at the Paul Sacher Foundation, which is making Stravinsky's estate accessible, had heightened awareness of the extraordinary significance of the work. Incidentally, Stravinsky gave the finalized autograph score to the Winterthur patron Werner Reinhart in gratitude for his help.
Far-reaching modernity
The Mizmorim idea was realized far more convincingly in the following days. The second string quartet by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, who was born near Krakow and works as a professor at the Vienna Academy of Music, proved to be a brilliant compendium of modern compositional techniques when interpreted by the Gringolts Quartet. Last season, Haubenstock-Ramati's Kafka opera America in Zurich with sensational success. The Sacher Foundation will also receive the materials for the production.
The world premiere of the duo, which has already been heard in Zurich, showed affirmative wildness sh'nayim levad (leàn?) - two alone (where to?) by the composer in residence Hed Bahack (born 1994). Ilya Gringolts and viola virtuoso Lawrence Power enhanced the vitality of the work, in which Bahack suggestively threads together the extreme values of interpersonal communication, from fear to the experience of crisis. Bahack's piece is also a performative event - like Mark Kopytman's October Sun for voice, flute, violin, violoncello, piano and percussion (1974). In this Swiss premiere, the Mizmorim Festival Ensemble also showed the organized aimlessness of the composition, which meanders in all voices and many styles with atonal fortissimo rebellions.
The exciting thing about the Mizmorim Festival was not only the foray into unknown musical realms with contributions by Jews in exile, whose traces were often lost in the migratory movements of the 20th century. Listeners were faced with the challenge of balancing the conscious perception of historical conditions with an unbiased openness to the musical experience.
On March 20, 2025 on SRF 2 at 8 p.m. in the program In the concert hall a cross-section can be heard:
