20 years of Spannungen

Jessica Duchen speaks to Lars Vogt about his festival in Heimbach, which began in 1998

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© Giorgia Bertazzi

How did Spannungen begin?

The first festival was held in 1998 and the planning for it started two years earlier. At the time I still lived in the area between Cologne and Aachen, just where the Eifel Mountains start. I had been to several of the famous chamber music festivals of the time – Lockenhaus, Risør, Stavanger – and I always loved being part of them. I thought that maybe one day I’d do a festival myself, trying to find the essence of the things I liked most about the others.

I was careful to drop the idea of a festival somewhere in the Eifel region to the person who at the time ran the local cultural association of the city of Düren. Soon he was ringing me up every two months to say, “When shall we go and look for a place?”

How did you settle on Heimbach and the power station?

Our special place had to have the right performance venue; it needed the right infrastructure; and it had to be a nice place, somewhere the musicians and their families would like to go! My colleague suggested first a castle in Heimbach, which the cultural association often used. It’s a beautiful place, and we have our rehearsals there, but it isn’t really big enough for the concerts. Next, we considered a church in Heimbach with old and new sections; we thought we could do concerts involving the different parts of the building, and I started inviting some artists – but it turned out that the church didn’t want any nonreligious music, so suddenly we had no venue! Then someone mentioned the power station.

I didn’t take it seriously at first, but when we went to check it out I discovered that it’s an astonishing building, Art Deco from 1904; it looks a bit like a cathedral of the industry of the time, and it’s by a lake with a mountain behind it.

There’s plenty of room to put up the stage between the old turbines and make it into a concert hall. The acoustic needed some work, as the floor is tiled. I did a test recital and we put in a carpet; it was soon clear that the atmosphere was unique and it could be beautiful. We had to experiment before the first festival, with curtains and carpets, but now the acoustics are something special. I always enjoy it when I bring new artists and they see this astonishing power station for the first time.

The title ‘Spannungen’ refers to more than the power station…?

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Spannung means ‘electric voltage’, but Spannungen also means ‘tensions’. I wanted a title that would reflect that we are there about the art and the truth: we want to dig deep and not offer people just superficial entertainment.

What is your approach to programming?

We want to play the great works of chamber music because they’re there for a reason, but we also want to discover unknown and new works. That’s why we always have a composer-in-residence who’s there with us and writes us a piece. We’ll always deal with new music and get to know a composer.

At the time we started Spannungen I was 27. Now I’m 47 and I’m keen to bring in the next generations. Thanks to some very generous donors, we give scholarships for younger musicians who can be there, play with us and be welcomed into the chamber music family. Alongside my ‘Rhapsody in Schools’ projects – taking music into schools in Heimbach and playing to the children – we always do a concert one morning just for schoolchildren. The whole power station fills up with 500 kids.

Your line-up of musicians seems to mix old friends and new?

Some people have been constant presences from the beginning, like Christian Tetzlaff and Antje Weithaas. Gustav Ravinius is here frequently now, as are Tanja Teztlaff, Sharon Kam, Isabelle Faust and Tatjana Masurenko. I try to mix this “family” with people who come once in a while, and with bringing in new people so that we don’t always ‘cook in the same juice’.

Sometimes our musicians are those with the bigger names, but often they aren’t. We want to find new musicians who fit in with a chemistry of music-making in which strong personality is welcomed, but ego must take a step back: everything is about the group result. This year’s newer faces include the violist Timothy Ridout and, here for the second time, the violinist Gergana Gergova and the double-bassist Charles DeRamus, among others. And I enjoy bringing very young musicians in to play with us so that we’re challenged by a new generation.

What are you most looking forward to this year?

My 16-year-old daughter Isabelle is performing with me, reciting Schumann melodramas. She’s very serious about becoming an actor. I’ve worked a lot before with actors and I thought we could do these melodramas, especially as they’re spooky and wonderfully horrible!

I also enjoy particularly mixing the different forms: for instance, to have first a duo, then a bigger group, then something with a narrator. We have Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale again this year, which we have not done since the second festival.

Why have you chosen Russia as the 2018 theme?

A local politician is planning to host some meetings and talks between Germany and Russia and suggested we could do something reflecting this. We’ve played a lot of Russian

music before, but we’ve never focused specially on this country. I’ve always been attracted to the culture, the language and the music, ever since childhood. I speak Russian, my first wife was Russian, my wife now is half Russian, so there’s a deep link.

We will have works by not only the most famous figures like Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, but also Glière, Arensky, Ustvolskaya and our composer-in-residence, Sergei Newski. His music is very experimental, and I’ve been impressed with how fearlessly he speaks out for human rights in Russia. My thought particularly was to show that even if we disagree on quite a lot of political issues, we still absolutely love and believe in the country and the culture. And there’s a whole lot of great music to discover.

Jessica Duchen is a music journalist and author of several novels and plays. Her writing has appeared in titles including The Independent, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, BBC Music Magazine and Opera News. She wrote the libretto for Roxanna Panufnik’s opera Silver Birch, and her latest novel Ghost Variations featured in the The Daily Mail’s Best Books of the Year 2016

www.jessicaduchen.co.uk