Colmar Festival 1999 - Tribute to Leonard Bernstein

By Patricia Boccadoro

COLMAR, FRANCE, 11 July 1999 - While half the population of Paris scuttled off to the French Riviera on July 1st for its annual holiday, a handful of wiser travellers headed East, past the famed villages of Burgundy and through the spectacular pine forests of Alsace to the capital of that delightful region of France known as the upper Rhine.

The enchanting medieval town of Colmar lies in a plain, where fields of corn give way to the local vineyards which rise in turn to touch the violet-grey smudges of the foothills of the Vosges.

This is Hansel and Gretel land. The air of the cobbled streets is scented by the colourful flowered baskets and pots hanging from the balconies of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century half-timbered houses, washed in shades of blue, ochre, vanilla and almond green.

Tourists gaze at the picturesque House of Heads(1609), a bygone family home decorated with one hundred and five grotesque masks, and queue to visit the Unterlinden Museum(1232). A former convent, it now houses works of art dating back to the end of the Middle Ages, including the beautiful Issenheim Altarpiece, painted by Mathias Grunwald in 1515. Not least of Colmar's attractions is the house of the sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, whose most famous work was the Statue of Liberty, completed in 1934.

The International Music Festival was created there in 1989, and since then, during the first two weeks of July, a series of exceptional concerts, each created for the Festival, is given in the historic churches, chapels, and synagogue. Young people play in the streets, and strains of music are often heard from open windows.

"I'd never even heard of Colmar when I came for a recital twelve years ago", the Russian-born violinist, Vladimir Spivakov told me, explaining how the previous mayor had attended his concert, and then discussed the project of a cultural programme with him, promising help if the musician accepted the post of artistic director for a music festival.

"It was destiny", he said. "And because I wanted it to be really special, and not like a mixed salad with any old thing thrown in, I came up with the idea of dedicating it to someone close to me who had brought light to the next generation with their music."

After winning the International Violin Competition of Montreal in 1969, Spivakov received a phone call from Glenn Gould in Toronto, congratulating him and suggesting they played together with a view to recording. But the young violinist was a Soviet citizen and permission was refused, a lost opportunity he has always regretted. He consequently chose to pay a tribute to Gould's work at his first festival, while subsequent years were dedicated to David Oistrakh, his teacher, Jacqueline du Pré, a friend from the Moscow Conservatory, and to Vladimir Horowitz.

On my first visit to Colmar six years ago, the guest of honour was Yehudi Menuhin who had encouraged Spivakov to form the Orchestre Les Virtuoses de Moscou in 1979, after the latter's successful debut as a conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Ravinia. Composed of the best soloists and prize-winners of all the orchestras in Russia, the ensemble, with its unique sound and remarkable precision is now considered one of the leading chamber orchestras in the world.

"Yehudi was one of my greatest friends", said Spivakov. "He was so modest and so shy. When he arrived in Colmar he said - Vladimir, I'm old and play not good, so close all doors. I don't want anyone to hear me practising. And he studied for two weeks in my hotel here, locked in my bathroom. He'd ask me which finger I used for certain passages, tried it, but when it didn't work, he found another way. I will study more he'd say, and was as happy as a child when what he was playing was good. He was continually learning. It wasn't his duty to play, it was his life."

The two violinists were also very close in their way of thinking, for they had similar humanistic ideas. Spivakov regularly played benefit concerts to help Yehudi Menuhin's school, and parallel to the festival, he created the Vladimir Spivakov International Charity Foundation in 1994 which offers creative and financial support to talented young people and needy children. As well as holding fund-raising concerts, musical instruments have been given to students, educational exchanges made, and each year the concert of young talent has become one of the highlights of the Colmar Festival. An exhibition of children's paintings from the region of Sakhaline was shown in the Koifhuis, the attractive fifteenth century congress centre. Such actions inevitably contribute to the particular atmosphere of graciousness and goodwill in the French town.

When I arrived in Colmar for this year's Tribute to Leonard Bernstein, Vladimir Spivakov was rehearsing a musical pas de deux with pianist Christian Zacharias in the newly renovated fourteenth century church of Saint Matthew. They were playing Schubert's Sonatina for violin and piano in A Minor, D 385, and Beethoven's Sonata for violin and piano No 3 in B Flat Major, opus 12 No 3, followed by his Sonata for violin and piano No 9 in A Major, opus 47, that evening, three of Leonard Bernstein's favourite works.

"Thirty years ago, when the Soviet government were refusing to allow me to perform in the West, Lenny Bernstein through his personal contacts managed to get me to join him in Salzburg, where he was conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, " Spivakov recalled.

"I remember spending the whole day before, until twelve o'clock at night, with the concierge at the Ministry of culture, and the joy I felt when I got my passport and flew to Vienna at seven the following morning. I'll never forget the meeting with Bernstein, the rehearsals, and the concert.

"Then we'd meet in New York or in Austria where he gave me his baton to conduct. He was the greatest teacher I had, helping so much with small practical details. The first time I conducted Mozart's Coronation Mass, the work which opened this festival, he said to me - "The rules dictate you should do it this way, but on stage, it's much better to do it differently. Break the rules!"

Whether Vladimir Spivakov conducting the Moscow Virtuosi, or the radiance of the young Russian soprano, Olga Trifonova, singing with the Moscow Academy of Choral Art, where the choir members are hand-picked from all four corners of the ex-Soviet Empire broke the rules, I wouldn't like to say, but the evening was a triumphant start to the twelve day festival. Each concert forms part of a mosaic to construct a complete portrait of the person honoured.

"Victor Popov, who directs the Academy is one of the most important choirmasters in Russia", Spivakov told me. "For men like Popov and Bernstein, music is their religion, and people like that are becoming very rare. It's irrelevant whether they play for three people or five thousand. They don't think of commercial success, but of what is eternal. About beauty and art. Evidently, the results are different."

"It's not enough to be competent professionally, you must give something more. You must leave on stage some drops of your blood, for concerts are not only to educate, but are an exchange of spiritual, physical, and psychological energy. Those listening must feel a part of what is happening, for the most important function of the arts is to make people creative. When you perform, it's the only thing that matters; there's no past or future, only the present. "I think Lenny would be happy to see the programme, and pleased to know how hard all the musicians are working on his music".