History in sound

For two weeks each summer, talented young musicians come together at Krzy?owa in Poland to study and perform chamber music with artists such as violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi and Midori and cellist Gary Hoffman on the estate once owned by Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800–91). This historic village, with a population of around 220, is the site of an international youth centre which aims to bring German and Polish youngsters together; but during the Krzy?owa-Music fortnight, artists from all over the world – in the 2019 event, from 18 August to 1 September, 19 nations were represented – work together in their common language, music.

Lower Silesia was German until 1945, and Krzy?owa (Kreisau in German) was the centre of the Kreisau Circle (1940–4), an anti-Nazi group dedicated to restoring democracy to Germany – one member was hanged after the abortive 20 July plot (although they were against killing Hitler), and in January 1945 their host, Helmuth James von Moltke (great-grandnephew of Moltke the Elder), was executed for treason. This year marked not only the 80th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, but also the 5th anniversary of Krzy?owa-Music and the 30th of the reconciliation meeting between Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany and then Polish prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, which led to the establishment of the youth centre.

The estate is wonderfully compact: the Manor House, where most rehearsals take place, presides over a rectangle of former agricultural buildings, restored in the local architectural style with pale ochre walls, red roofs and dormer windows like waves, around a lawn over which the summer swallows skim. I stayed in the Granary, like most participants, and we had lunch in the Cowshed. Everyone is well looked after, with three meals a day and afternoon tea. You come down to breakfast to the sound of a piano being tuned and everywhere you hear instruments being practised or music being rehearsed. The atmosphere is very like that at Marlboro Music in Vermont, where artistic director Viviane Hagner, the Berlin-based violinist, was nurtured. The musicians’ families are welcomed, so children run about. General director Matthias von Hoand his wife, Dorothy, have personal connections with Krzy?owa: she is a Moltke and he is a distant cousin of that family.

The 45 chosen works are rehearsed in Marlboro fashion, with at least one older hand guiding the younger ones and the programme for each evening concert being decided on the day. This year sixteen new young players and fourteen who had previously participated were joined by seven young but experienced mentors, two guests (harp and percussion) and twelve established musicians. Marlboro founding fathers Adolf Busch and Rudolf Serkin, who often played in the old Breslau (now Wroc?aw, the region’s historical capital), would have approved (coincidentally, Serkin was a childhood friend of Freya von Moltke, Helmuth James’s wife). I was sorry to miss Peter Serkin, who was too ill to travel from America.

I heard the first four concerts, which were of high quality and interest. The 22 August programme began with two splendid movements for four cellos by Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986), the Polish composer who lived and worked in Paris and had a wartime interlude in Hollywood. Hoffman, Alexey Stadler, Guillaume Artus and Ari Evan played them beautifully. Mendelssohn’s C minor Piano Trio, which I prefer to the D minor, was performed with disarming simplicity by violinist Sophie Wang, cellist Joshua Halpern and pianist Annika Treutler. Then came Christian Jost’s interesting expansion (dated 2017) of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, conducted by the composer, with barefoot French soprano Sarah Aristidou and nine instrumentalists. Inevitably it substitutes overstatement for Schumann’s understatement, but there are ear-tickling sonorities, not least for the string quartet.

Left to right violists Karolina Errera and James Yoon, and cellist Gary Hoffman perform Brahms’s G major String Quintet

Everywhere you hear instruments being practised or music being rehearsed

At St Anne’s Church, Grodziszcze, the following evening, we had a stylish Mozart ‘Kegelstatt’ Trio (Pablo Barragବ clarinet; Daniel Orsen, viola; Sam Armstrong, piano); a Debussy Sonata for flute, viola and harp (Susan Kang, Karolina Errera and Anna Viechtl respectively), with radiant sounds from the Russian-Dominican violist; Aristidou really enjoying herself in Schubert’s Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, with Treutler and clarinettist Andrzej Ciepli?ski; the chirpy Sextet for piano and wind quintet by the Dutch composer Leo Smit, a tragic victim of Nazi persecution; and Mozart’s E flat major Piano Quartet, with violinist Abigel Kralik, a Perlman pupil, SoSoulez Lariviere on the viola, Hoffman and pianist Jonathan Zydek.

In the 24 August concert, trios were in the spotlight. Oboist Viola Wilmsen was joined in a piquant reading of Britten’s Phantasy Quartet by a string threesome of Savitri Grier, Katharina Kang and Alexander Kovalev. Beethoven’s C minor String Trio op.9 no.3 was given a strong performance by Olivier Robin, Errera and Evan; and Aristidou plus piano quintet offered Turina’s Las musas de Andaluca, in which I longed for more of the soprano’s voice. Dvo?૒s F minor Piano Trio, well anchored by pianist Julia Hamos, suffered from cellist Oliver Herbert’s reluctance or inability to match violinist Stephen Waarts’s authentic portamentos.

geert maciejewski

My last concert, on 25 August, had poignant undertones: it was at the White Stork Synagogue in Wroc?aw, built in 1829 on the site of an inn. Breslau had a huge Jewish community who loved music. I viewed a very moving photographic exhibition of old Breslau’s Hasidic Jewish life, virtually exterminated by the Nazis, who burnt down the city’s main synagogue on Kristallnacht but could only trash this one because other structures were too near. The congregation redecorated it, but from 1943 were rounded up in this very synagogue before being sent to the death camps. The building, left to deteriorate after 1945, was recently restored.

We heard Bach’s cantata Ich habe genug BWV82, beautifully sung by baritone Michael Rakotoarivony with a small ensemble, followed by a stirring account of Brahms’s G major String Quintet (with violinists Waarts and Yuval Herz, violists Errera and James Yoon, plus Hoffman), of which I had heard a rehearsal. In a well-prepared Messiaen Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Miriam Helms Ĭien, violin; Barragଠand Stadler; and Yannick Rafalimanana, piano), in which clarinettist Barragଠwas magnificent, I had issues with the strings’ vibrato: the violinist’s often started late, the cellist’s was too intense for ‘Louange o’rnite Js’. No one has yet matched ȴienne Pasquier, the original cellist, in Messiaen’s own recording.

Other rehearsals I heard include Midori leading Mozart’s G minor String Quintet with Nils Momeyer as first viola, Ashkenasi in Beethoven’s E flat major Piano Trio op.70 no.2, and a terrific Polish horn player, Ewa Paciorek, in Brahms’s Horn Trio. I had time for two outings: to the Berghaus, where the Moltke family lived when upkeep of the Manor House was too difficult; and to the Unesco World Heritage Site the Church of Peace in ?widnica (formerly Schweidnitz), one of three such churches built in the mid-17th century as a condition of the Peace of Westphalia. In a fit of pique, the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand III insisted no metal should be employed, just wood, sand, clay and straw – yet two of these churches are still standing. The enormous ?widnica edifice can hold 7,500 souls, with 3,000 seated, and the interior is exuberantly Baroque.

After my departure there were seven more concerts, including one at the Church of Peace, before a brief tour of Poland and Germany by various Krzy?owa-Music ensembles, taking in Berlin, Warsaw, the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival and the Beethoven Festival in Bonn. I had many interesting discussions and have just one regret: not hearing Hagner herself play. It’s an indication of her selfless dedication to pushing others forward.