When the tanks rolled into Israel, Avi Shoshani discovered the power of music to unite. The Yom Kippur War was raging in 1973, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) was giving free performances on the home front.
“Concert halls were absolutely packed,” says Shoshani. “There was a curfew, there was a war. But people wanted something that reminded them they could hang onto beauty, to hang onto culture.”
Now Shoshani, general manger of the IPO, is taking that vision into another conflict-ridden region: wedged between Russia, Turkey and Iran, the Caucasus region is a microcosm of broader geopolitical tensions.
That has not stopped Shoshani and his associates from launching a classical music festival at its heart. Earlier this month on a remote Georgian country estate the Tsinandali Festival took place, ending last weekend.
An impressive lineup of soloists including András Schiff, Yuja Wang and Thomas Hampson took part. Spearheading the whole event was the Pan Caucasian Festival Youth Orchestra (PCYO).
Gianandrea Noseda, its illustrious music director, opened proceedings with a blistering account of Mahler’s mammoth 2nd Symphony. With players hailing from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Ukraine, its aim is to bridge communities in a divided region.
Shoshani did not envisage taking on such a major project at this late stage in his long career. He joined the IPO’s management in 1973, became its General Manager seven years later and teamed up with Swedish agent Martin Engstroem to create the world-famous Verbier Festival in Switzerland in 1994.
Three years ago, Shoshani and Engstroem were asked by George Ramishvili, the Chairman of the Georgian investment group company Silk Road, to create a comparable event in Tsinandali. One of their conditions was that he would also create the PCYO.
The Tsinandali Estate, located 100km east of Tbilisi, has been transformed. A $12m investment has seen two new auditoriums (a larger open-air venue and a smaller one for chamber music), a luxurious hotel and a centre for members of the PCYO and the festival’s Academy added to the former home of the poet Prince Alexander Chavchavadze.
Here political tensions feel like a distant reality, but when I speak with one young Georgian violinist about the build up of Russian armed forces on the border with South Ossetia, and the violent anti-Russian protests that erupted in Tbilisi in June, they come rushing into focus.
Intercommunity relations elsewhere in the region are similarly fraught: clashes broke out between Armenian and Azerbaijani armed forces in 2016; Turkey’s reputation has never recovered from the Armenian genocide that took place a century ago.
But Shoshani is pleased with the way the PCYO is gelling: “The other day I was on a golf cart to the museum and two kids asked to come. It was a Turkish boy and an Armenian girl, and they were talking about bows, music and interpretation.
“I thought ‘now I can go home’. In the end we are all brothers. Music is definitely an international language that can bring people together.”
That view was honed through years of hardship in Israel. During the First Gulf War, the IPO playing to a packed hall in Jaffa became for Shoshani an abiding symbol of humanity flourishing in times of adversity.
“All of a sudden, during war, everyone is more polite. Everyone is more willing to help his neighbour. People want to hold onto something that resembles human values. I don’t know how it is in other countries. In Israel everybody becomes a friend.”
The PCYO is the heir to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian scholar Edward Said in 1999, which unites Arab and Israeli players.
In 2015, Omer Meir Wellber, the 37-year-old Israeli conductor, helped launch Sarab: Strings of change, a music education project for young Bedouins of the Israeli Negev region.
Why have so many Jewish conductors been drawn to projects that unite communities through musical excellence? “The only way for Jews to get away from the ghetto and to be looked at as equal was to belong to societies and institutions where talent was the only criteria to be evaluated,” Shoshani says.
“That has made us more involved and interested in bringing people together in situations where culture, talent and knowhow is what people will be looking at.”
But the IPO, described on its website as “Israel’s foremost cultural ambassador”, has faced protests abroad. In 2011, its live-broadcast BBC Proms concert was disrupted by anti-Israel campaigners, and performances at New York’s Carnegie Hall drew further protests in 2017 and earlier this year.
Shoshani tells me: “We are the other side that Israel can offer. It’s not only about intifada, Palestinians, bombarding, conflicts between religious and secular groups or the left and right.”
Does Tsinandali present Shoshani with the opportunity to engage in outreach work that might be construed as criticism of domestic policy in Israel? Shoshani turns my question on its head, saying the IPO can be — and is — critical.
That is possible partly because the orchestra raises most of its funds through ticket sales and private donations. “We get only about 10 percent of our budget [from public sources]. So far the government has not really touched us.
“But there’s no doubt that Ministry of Culture tries to interfere, especially with theatres. The Ministry has said many times that if it sees anything that betrays Israel it will allow itself to cut [the theatre’s] subsidy.”
That kind of political intervention resembles a trend in European nations in which far right parties are on the rise. “Nothing has changed. People are only forgetting about Stalin. People have forgotten what it means to live under fascism.
“By the time it finally hits them it will be too late change things. Right now people have a comfortable life. They don’t know what the end might be.”
Long before Tsinandali, the IPO was, apart from a cultural ambassador, a promoter of justice and intercommunity cooperation.
In 2001, Zubin Mehta, the IPO’s Music Director for the last 50 years, denounced the Knesset’s decision to make Barenboim a persona non grata after the conductor performed Wagner in Israel, and repeatedly decried the building of settlements in Palestinian territories.
“Shesh-Besh”, The Arab-Jewish Ensemble, unites IPO musicians with Israeli Arabs. The “Mifneh” (“turning point”) project provides young people from the country’s Arab communities with music education.
The orchestra’s long-term ambition to admit an Israeli Arab has so far been fruitless, but Shoshani remains upbeat about the chances of doing so. Plans to perform Wagner, on the other hand, are on the back burner. When in 1981 the IPO performed Wagner in Israel, ending a 40 -year boycott, there was outrage.
“To be honest I was stupid and green,” Shoshani says. “We didn’t understand [the full implications of playing Wagner] until we met survivors of the Holocaust. Nobody should criticise them; nobody should argue with them.
“Wagner’s music became to them a symbol of the horror they experienced in the concentration camps. So it will not happen for another 10 years, another 20 years. What’s the hurry?”
The IPO is entering a new phase of its life, with the 29-year-old conductor Lahav Shani following Mehta as music director next year and the orchestra having replaced around 40 retirement-age players over the last five years. Now, Shoshani is searching for his own replacement.
“My initial feeling was that I should leave with [Mehta]. I grew up next to him, he shaped me up, everything I learned about orchestras I got from him. He’s like my brother, like my teacher, like my mentor...
“But the orchestra asked me if I would mind staying for a few more years. And I couldn’t say no. This is the only job I ever had.
“I [keep] telling my colleagues: ‘Don’t look for somebody that is similar to me,’ because that doesn’t make sense. I’ve been at the orchestra for 45 years. You bring in a young boy and he should be brilliant in things that I am not. Even so, I will be there for at least another two years.”
Then Shoshani will have more time to dedicate to projects like the Tsinandali Festival. Could the PCYO one day become as influential as the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra? The unstable nature of local politics makes it impossible to plan too far ahead, he says.
“All of a sudden there are no direct flights between Georgia and Russia. We don’t know what is going to happen. But I’m used to living under a threat. I don’t know any other way to live. Whenever I visit Switzerland it feels like a silly operetta,” he laughs.
“I once said to a friend we should live every day as if it was our last,” Shoshani concludes. “He told me: ‘no, we should live every day as if it was our first’.”
