Zagreb International Chamber Music Festival

hing came out of it, however: Very soon I felt a wish to contribute to the cultural life of my adopted homeland with something of my own, to make chamber music with my musician friends and to show them “my” Zagreb during their stay here. When I talked to my Croatian friends about it for the first time, it was always met with the same reaction: Chamber music is supposedly old-fashioned, it isn’t popular, it’s a genre for the elderly (mostly played by older people as well), boring… I was seriously advised not include the term “chamber music” in the title of our festival. Indeed, I discovered that chamber music was all but forgotten in Croatia and that the concert cycles that do offer chamber music shy away from the term, if possible, choosing to call it “musical soirées”, or, even better, “musical pearls”, instead. After all, the Croatian Music Institute concert hall – built in 1827, one of the most beautiful concert halls in Europe, in the centre of Zagreb, with 450 seats – bore witness to the old European chamber music tradition. It is at this hall that Pablo Casals, Vladimir Horowitz, and Arthur Rubinstein, as well as many other great chamber musicians, have performed. I was astounded to learn that the beautiful concert hall, in all its peeled-off beauty, has been degraded to a mere exam- and student concert-stage, while almost all the major concert events take place at the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall, a multi-purpose hall seating around 2000 people and located on the fringe of the city centre. The idea was born quickly, and there ensued a rapid implementation: As absolute beginners in the field of concert organization, we jumped into cold waters and began to organize our first festival in October of 2006, and managed to hold 4 concerts with 10 musicians in December of 2006. The beginning was hard: If we had known how much time, energy and private money the founding of a festival would devour, surely we would not have dared to go for it. This way, without prior knowledge and armed with a huge amount of enthusiasm and belief in our project, we set out to create a festival – and got overwhelmed by the positive responses from the audience, the participating musicians and the local media. It seemed we managed to fill a gaping hole in the Zagreb cultural life. The Festival developed a dynamics of its own and kept growing and has long since become an integral part of Croatian culture, one that can’t be thought away anymore. A lack of private sponsors, for example, presents a huge problem. This is due to the new social structures in Croatia, developing since the demise of the socialist system and the war in Croatia. The privatization of state companies created, just like in Russia, a new moneyed class, “still” pursuing other interests rather than supporting a chamber music festival. Private funding in Croatia mostly supports sports, followed by humanitarian causes, pop and folk music... Culture, and especially classical music, is in a difficult position, and depend primarily on public funds. Changing that is one of our missions: We want to present chamber music for what it is, full of energy, music to awaken, touch and stir up the innermost feelings… For me, chamber music, if done well, is the most direct way towards an audience, making a magical connection between the musicians and the listeners, unparalleled in this form. Our goals? They are innumerable. We do, of course, want to keep growing, for stagnation equals demise. With our festival we want to enrich and foster the cultural life of Croatia, that’s an important concern of ours. Culture can develop only through exchange. Isolation means stagnation, and with it, a loss of quality sneaks in – this is precisely what happened with chamber music in Croatia over the past decades. Our festival is Zagreb’s very own festival, tightly connected to the city, which is why its name is a part of out title. Additionaly, for me, personally, education of children and young people is of utmost importance. After all, it also creates new audiences and sharpens the awareness of the importance of culture in general and chamber music in particular. In the future, we want a stronger collaboration with kindergartens and schools – public rehearsals, as well as projects bringing festival participants to schools, are some of the possibilities. Besides that, we have been making plans to include international courses and masterclasses in our festival, with guest professors and students from all over the world. We still have a lot to do!"

Susanna Yoko Henkel, artistic director


Zagreb Kom ostvaruje se pod okriljem umjetničke organizacije Zagrebački međunarodni festival komorne glazbe. Festival svake godine okuplja vrhunske svjetske glazbenike koji u nekoliko listopadskih dana za zagrebačku publiku ostvaruju jedinstvene izvedbe, u jedinstvenom sastavu. Uvijek inzistirajući na izvrsnosti programa i izvođača, te potičući suradnju domaćih i inozemnih glazbenika, Zagreb Kom daje svoj obol pozicioniranju Zagreba na europskoj kulturnoj mapi.