All chamber music paths, they currently do not lead to Rome, but to Kronberg. Because here – at the final station of the S4, after a 20-minute drive from Frankfurt, you can get out of this new terminus Klangsehnsucht – there is a hotel that already visually represents the first anchor point of the Pablo Casals Forum that opens behind it.
It was the developer of the accommodation facility who gave the decisive impetus to dare a few years ago: the long-dreamed and long-planned merger of the Kronberg-based Academy of Excellence with a new concert hall.
The fact that the new campus is now completed by a bed block is a good thing. Before, a dilapidated parking deck greeted the visitors of what is after all the fourth richest community in Germany.
But now everything is fine-tuned here in the Taunus. Nearly. The finishing touches are still being put on the curved roof of the concert hall – just like on the outdoor facilities. You can see the raw interface on the academy building, which disappears halfway into the hill of the Schillergarten residential complex, which is also new. Expansion rooms are planned there in the future and parallel to the S-Bahn track, a student residence for the highly talented musicians who are currently still living all over the place.
In 1993 the Kronberg Academy was founded under different circumstances. On its 30th anniversary it has a permanent building and its own hall. Like the hotel, it was designed by Volker Staab and his office. As an acoustician, Martijn Vercammen was involved in optimizing the sound of the hall for a maximum of 600 visitors.
It curls up beautifully once you have entered the hall through the angular concrete foyer. It is lined with oak and equipped with dark upholstered seats. The colors are warm and soothing. Everything here is classy. An airy staircase lures you into the actual foyer above, where you can look through seamless glass walls at the level of the historic Victoria Park and pond.
In the chamber music hall of the Casals Forum in Kronberg
Source: Photos from the Chamber Music Hall/Marcus Ebener
Nature – the paths into the green are still being merged – is penetrating into art. And it opens up to the world. It really doesn’t get any more harmonious than that. The only chamber music hall in the Rhine-Main area built for this purpose is also built to be energy-efficient.
They had started in 2017, but they narrowly escaped any necessary budget increases due to the pandemic and price increases. 65 million had to be spent on this, half came from private sources, the rest from the federal government, the state and the city.
Is that important? In any case. The Kronberg Academy, initially set up to optimize cellists, is now also open to violin, viola and piano in chamber music, and will soon also be open to double bass. Since it was founded almost by chance, it has quickly become a success story.
Raimund Trenkler, the founder of the Academy, who was a successful cellist himself, grew up here. At first he wanted to organize “a kind of cello family reunion” in the pleasant place. Concerts could be given in the various churches, the historic town hall, in the castle or in the old recipe. The baroque administration building was then used for decades, until everything could now be centralized and improved.
Mstislav Rostropowitsch and Gidon Kremer, later András Schiff and Tabea Zimmermann and many other famous musicians were quasi anchor teachers and drivers in Kronberg concentrating entirely on teaching, mediating and playing. The academy followed the example of rural American chamber music academies such as those in Aspen, Marlboro and Tanglewood.
View of the chamber music hall of the Casals Forum in Kronberg
Source: Photos from the Marcus Ebener Chamber Music Hall
What were first master classes became an academy that is affiliated with the Frankfurt Music Academy, but can work almost independently of institutional constraints. Which quickly came under the good, humane spirit of the pacifist cello legend Pablo Casals. He died in 1973, but his widow Marta Casals Istomin still actively cherishes his memory here today. Bronze busts commemorate him and Rostropovich.
The demand in Streicherland is high, and the threshold to reach this Olympus is even higher. But now his alumni are everywhere. They came to study here completely or just to optimize themselves, but today they all carry Kronberg in their hearts – and out into the music world.
Here comes a picture
And now you finally have a hall. Not only for the two own festivals in spring and autumn (which also include a violin making fair every two years), but also for the associated public master classes for cello or violin in the “world capital of the cello” (Rostropovich). It is shaped like a stringed instrument – this is how the violin mecca of Cremona knew how to build it – sounds wonderfully compact, but also allows the tones to vibrate freely.
You don’t want to be in competition with Frankfurt’s musical life, but complement it. That is being accepted brilliantly. The Frankfurt baroque orchestra La Stagione under Michael Schneider now tested the gradual sloping platform with 60 musicians in real concerti grossi in front of a rather sedate but juvenile cheering audience. Next door, in the sober, shoebox-like Carl Bechstein Hall, which seats 150, alumnus Kian Soltani and seven cello colleagues who are currently studying are mixing up their much younger audience in green-pink lighting.
Strategic Partnerships
There should be eighty concerts per year in the Casals Forum. The number seems feasible, because that’s why Raimund Trenkler and his artistic director Friedemann Eichhorn – violin professor in Weimar – formed strategic partnerships early on. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe will not only move its headquarters to Kronberg because of Brexit, but will also develop programs here and go on tour with it.
Gidon Kremer’s Kremerata Baltica will also regularly practice and give concerts here, as will the Ensemble Building Bridges, which is made up of musicians with a migration background, and the Ensemble Resonanz, which is also associated with the Elbphilharmonie. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra will certainly soon be looking at this new opportunity to play and stay. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe will not only move its headquarters to Kronberg because of Brexit, but will also develop programs here and go on tour with it.
Gidon Kremer’s Kremerata Baltica will also regularly practice and give concerts here, as will the Ensemble Building Bridges, which is made up of musicians with a migration background, and the Ensemble Resonanz, which is also associated with the Elbphilharmonie. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra will certainly soon be looking at this new opportunity to play and stay.
So in three decades Kronberg has grown together with its chamber academy, the wealthy in the Taunus have accommodated students and have been hooked on music. 36 students from 17 nations meet 22 lecturers, including eleven main subject teachers, guest lecturers and theory lecturers. And now one opens up to the outside world elegantly and harmoniously in the concert hall and a little monastic-like in the academy building centered on the inner courtyard, in front of which the tent-like hall roof will soon shine in all its glory with its anodised aluminum shingles.
So you are quite an isolated teaching establishment, where instead of the usual student-professor relationship, you cultivate “dialogues” and “chair circles” almost at eye level, and still let yourself be heard by everyone.