Music: Caucasus’ orchestra for peace
By Meline Toumani The New York Times

International Herald Tribune, France
Aug 26 2005

BATUMI, Georgia Two years ago, Uwe Berkemer, a German conductor
working in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, had an idea that seemed
simple, even sweet: Create a chamber orchestra with musicians from
all over the Caucasus, a region between the Black and Caspian Seas
that separates Europe from Asia and is home to ethnic groups that
speak more than 40 languages.

The orchestra, he imagined, would demonstrate that music is a unifying
force. And it would symbolize the potential for peace among groups
engaged in intractable conflicts over land and sovereignty: Russians
and Chechens, Georgians and Abkhazians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis,
to name a few.

Inspired by the momentum for change in Georgia following the 2003
bloodless revolution that ousted the former Soviet republic’s longtime
leader, Eduard Shevardnadze, Berkemer set out on a mission that
mixed music and politics: His Caucasian Chamber Orchestra would be
a permanent, full-time performing group, based in Tbilisi, bringing
together the best musicians from Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and
the North Caucasus areas of Russia. But when Berkemer sought the
support of cultural ministries in each country, he discovered that
not everyone agreed that music should transcend ethnic disputes.

Georgia was quick to sign on. Armenia soon followed, despite rising
tensions between Georgians and ethnic Armenians living in Georgia’s
Javakheti region. But there was no word from Azerbaijan.

After five months and many earnest overtures from Berkemer, European
Union delegates and diplomats throughout the region, a letter
arrived. Azerbaijan’s minister of culture, Polad Bulbuloglu, who had
been a Soviet-era pop star, wrote that Azerbaijani musicians would
not participate. It would be inconceivable to place them alongside
Armenian musicians, he wrote, as long as Armenian forces occupied
the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Berkemer eventually hired 5 musicians from Armenia, 10 from Georgia
and 1 from Dagestan, a Muslim-populated region of Russia bordering
Chechnya. A chamber orchestra should have 16 to 19 musicians, “so we
are saving three seats” for the Azerbaijanis, he said, “whenever they
are ready to join us.”

The next problem for the orchestra was how to make a proper debut.

Berkemer and his staff decided to organize a festival in Batumi,
the capital of the Ajaria region, on the Black Sea.

Batumi looks peculiar even before an onlooker learns of its history.
Thanks to its seaside location, tall palms line the streets, and
a mild, wet climate creates a relaxed, tropical feeling. But large
blocks of shabby Soviet-style apartment buildings loom over the beach
cafes, reminding visitors that this quiet resort town has been through
tumultuous changes in the last century, the last decade and even in
the last year.

Until a year ago, Aslan Abashidze, who ruled Ajaria for 13 years,
ran the region as though it were his private kingdom. When Georgia’s
new president, Mikhail Saakashvili, took power early last year, one
of his first moves was to assert national sovereignty over the region,
forcing Abashidze to flee the country.

According to Ajaria’s newly reinstated minister of culture, Alexandre
Gegenava, local cultural life was transformed. “For 13 years,
Abashidze controlled all performances to suit his own interests,”
Gegenava said. “Normal people could not attend concerts. It was
always just the same people: his ministers, his bodyguards and his
slaves. Everybody knew whose seat was whose.”

Gegenava, who also worked in cultural administration during the
Soviet era, said that he himself would not have been able to enter
the theater during the Abashidze years.

Learning of this detail late in the planning process, Berkemer wondered
whether his orchestra’s debut, and the Batumi Music Festival overall,
were doomed to echo in empty halls.

Opening night on Aug. 11 was encouraging. The Batumi Theater, which
seats about 500, was two-thirds full, and the diversity of the audience
would have been notable anywhere in the world: a mix of children and
adults; dignitaries from Tbilisi, Germany and Britain; a local priest,
and tanned tourists.

Berkemer led the orchestra through Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” and
Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. Marina Iashvili, a prominent
violin soloist of the Soviet era, performed with the group. The young
orchestra members – many of them fresh from conservatories in Tbilisi
and Yerevan, Armenia – beamed as the audience demanded four encores.

And in a move that won him many fans, Berkemer – standing out with
pale skin and white-blond hair in a room full of black-haired,
dark-eyed locals – sang an unofficial Georgian anthem, “Suliko.”

For a Saturday night “Concert for Peace,” Berkemer chose Britten’s
“Lachrymae” and Hindemith’s “Trauermusik” (Funeral Music). He wanted
to play Hindemith, he said, because the composer had been exiled from
Nazi Germany after Goebbels denounced him as an “atonal noisemaker.”
The composer’s experience as a refugee and the melancholy quality of
his composition, Berkemer said, lent respect to Caucasian war victims,
to whom the concert was dedicated.

Other festival events included late-night serenades in the
candle-lighted art museum by a vocal ensemble, Largo, which presented
songs from Chechnya, Ossetia and regions in Georgia; and by the Batumi
State Vocal Ensemble, which performed in the characteristic Georgian
male a cappella tradition.

Batumi residents seemed enthusiastic about the Caucasian Chamber
Orchestra but retained mixed expectations for solutions to the ethnic
conflicts in the region.

Giorgi Masalkin, a deputy in the Ajaria Supreme Council and a professor
of philosophy at Batumi State University, had taken his young daughter
to see the orchestra perform. “I want her to see the similarities
between people,” he said. “Acknowledging what’s common between you
and your neighbors is 50 percent of good relations.”