The sound of silence

The musical profession has never recognised borders. Composers, performers and ensembles have moved from city to city and country to country, learning and teaching, experimenting with local styles, adding to the repertoire and delighting patrons and the public. This cosmopolitanism belongs to the spirit of Western music, which is an art without frontiers, flowing unhindered into every corner of the civilised world. You can put together an orchestra in which no member shares ethnicity, language or creed with any other, and still be true to the spirit of Mozart, Debussy or Elgar. For our musical tradition is a universal bond between strangers. Music is the one sphere in which the EU’s goal of a Europe without national boundaries makes sense — for it was a goal already achieved by Handel, Scarlatti and Bach.

It was in this cosmopolitan spirit that the German conductor Volker Hartung founded the Cologne New Philharmonic, an orchestra of young musicians that has now begun to make recordings under Hartung’s refined and devoted leadership. The band travels from place to place across the Continent, performing in all the venues that would like to hear live music, but which cannot afford the fees demanded by the big established orchestras.

It is enthusiastically received, but that enthusiasm is not universally shared. After a performance of Ravel’s Bolero and Bizet’s Carmen Suite at the Strasbourg Palais de la Musique in February, Hartung returned to the platform to thunderous applause, picked up his baton to begin an encore, and was promptly seized and marched off by the police. This was not the first time that he had been in trouble with the French authorities: a previous concert in Nice having also been raided. However, it was the first time that he had been forced to pay for his popularity with a couple of nights in jail, being interrogated throughout the first of those nights by insolent officers who denied him not only food and drink but also the use of the toilet.