‘Let’s do something, people!’ The Gstaad Menuhin Festival embraces change

Set in the heavenly Swiss Alps, the annual Gstaad Menuhin Festival offers a cornucopia of music performed at the highest standards alongside an emphasis on the next generation, nurtured via its academies. Founded by violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the Festival’s first incarnation was in 1957; Christoph Müller has been at the helm since 2002. One of the defining factors of the festival over the years has been the imagination of the programming.

From 2023, the festival’s 67th year, Gstaad offers a cycle of three themes under the umbrella title of ‘Change’: Humility, Transformation (2024) and Migration (2025). Desmond Cecil’s December 2022 article in Classical Music provided a satisfying overview of the festival, but seeing three salient events in Gstaad revealed the true depth of the conception and excellence of its realisation.

(Image courtesy of Gstaad Menuhin Festival)

The first was the Music for the Planet concert on August 5. Afterwards I talked to violinist/composer Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who led the concert and is an enduring key player at Gstaad, what the aim of this ecologically-minded programme was. Was the intent to plant ideas, like seeds, for later; or was she hoping for a more immediate reaction? ‘Both.’ She replies, ‘Time is running out. A human being is like a parasite, but much stupider, because a parasite does not eat the host body to death – its takes care, it leaves its host alive. We are even stupider than parasites. We, who made the atomic bomb, have enough brains to destroy but not enough to survive’.

Regarding this year’s festival theme of humility, Müller explains it is ‘an attitude of everyone now in 2023, after all that happened. In the past years nothing was normal.’ With humility (demut) comes the idea of vorbilder (role-models), another aspect humankind’s humility, with Nature as supreme force: ‘It’s tricky,’ says Müller. ‘If it can’t be perfect, at least people start to discuss it, and that becomes part of culture’.

The concerts were powerful. Mandolin player Avi Avital was joined by Maurice Steger (recorders), Hille Perl (viola da gamba) and Sebastian Wienand (organ/harpsichord) for Bach’s Playlist at Zweisimmen Church. The concert presented Bach’s own ‘playlists’ for his family: the Klavierbüchlein für W. F. Bach and the Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach, acts of love from a father and husband to those around him, in stunning arrangements. Avital is a true virtuoso; Perl needs little introduction, her playing masterly, her presence deep and wise; Steger (with a stack of instruments) played with immense character – even cheekiness. A programme that might appear somewhat dry on paper came vibrantly to life.

(Image courtesy of Gstaad menuhin Festival)

There are surely few (if any) other festivals that would confront such huge issues as here. Kopatchinskaja is the perfect match. She took on even more than even she thought for her Music for the Planet concert. When the conductor, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, fell ill at the eleventh hour. Kopatchinskaja took sole control, directing the first four movements of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (concluding instead with the Eroica’s ‘Marcia funebre’), playing the theme of Schumann’s Geister-Variationen before soloing in the slow movement of Schumann’s woefully under-rated Violin Concerto. Finally, the Passacaglia from Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, morphing into the cooly terrifying sounds of Nono’s Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (1966, ‘Remember what they did to you in Auschwitz’).

The ‘Pastoral’ was an astonishing performance; the music seemed to inhale and exhale completely naturally. A draped screen (with video by visual artists Tabea Rothfuchs and Ruth Stofer) flickered into life; idyllic impressions of nature alternated with images of detritus. Some aspects of the score were enhanced – tutti foot-stomping in rustic dance, with a core of urgency. Blazing horns and scenes of forest fires were all part of the programme, as was the most visceral ‘Storm’ this reviewer has ever heard. 

(Image courtesy of Gstaad Menuhin Festival)

The disjointed, discombobulated world of late Schumann followd: the theme of the Geistervariationen (his last work before he threw himself in the Rhine) and that concerto movement, spun unforgettably by Kopatchinskaja and the Gstaad Orchestra. Searing Shostakovich blended into the Nono, the latter a piece that itself has keenings prefiguring the final use of the ancient, reconstructed instrument, the carnyx (played by Abraham Cupeiro), a sound much like the anguished cries of an animal. ‘It’s like the last sounds that we would hear before the catastrophe really emerges,’ says Kopatchinskaja. ‘I’m not an alarmist, I am a simple human. I have a daughter; I am a mother. I would like to leave this planet with a future, in good hands. And I don’t feel it is in good hands at the moment. It's a scream out of my soul... let’s do something, people!’

Another existential cri de coeur came in the form of Schubert’s Winterreise in a performance in Saanen church by Matthias Goerne, a singer intimately associated with this work, and pianist Maria João Pires. The third in the 'Demut und Glaube’ (humility and belief) series. A performance of blistering intensity, Pires was faultless; Goerne’s voice was almost expressionistic at times and the audience felt the modernity of Schubert’s writing in ‘Letzte Hoffnung’ and the unceasing heartbreak of ‘Der Leiermann’.

Next year’s festival on the theme of ‘Transformation’ sounds just as stimulating. ‘Without transformation, there would be no music. It is always a fantasy,’ says Kopatchinskaja, citing Pierrot Lunaire. Müller is exited about more Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht, and the opera for 2024, Tristan, (with Kaufmann and Nylund). As to ‘Migration,’ as Kopatchinskaja says, there are ‘a lot of artists with two souls, two hearts’.

For a major festival to broach such major issues head-on, to confront climate change, to consider humanity's place in the universe, is brave indeed. The Gstaad Menuhin Festival goes from strength to strength.