A survey by the federal and state statistical offices recorded 1,641 music festivals six years ago.
One of them has been in Husum for 34 years.
It only lasts a good week in which seven or eight pianists only give one piano recital each.
The statement that no big names appear there would be countered by the fact that there are excellent musicians who have simply found too little recognition in the star-fixated music business.
They have complete freedom in their choice of programs.
Almost all.
In contrast to the established ones who have a sales pitch at deluxe festivities with standard programs, they have to present "rarities of piano music" according to the title of the festival.
It takes place in the knight's hall of the “Schloss vor Husum”, the former secondary residence of the ducal house of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, and it is intended for people, said the Canadian pianist and composer Marc-André Hamelin, “who want more than Standard programs. It is probably the most perfect festival in the world. ”Hamelin was already a star, even if not well known in Germany, when he played the twelfth of his etudes here in 1988 and a year later the adaptation of a Chopin etude by the legendary Leopold Godowsky.
But: the perfect festival? A festival without any shine? Without sophisticated chic? With concerts in a small, rather simple hall, which on sunny days becomes a heat test for the 160 visitors and which is hardly up to the sound of a concert grand, especially when the pianist Nicolas Stavy with Franz Liszt's tone poem “From the cradle to the Bahre ”reveals that the composer was the discoverer of the mighty sound. In the passages of the inner part (“The Struggle for Dasein”) with their “violente staccato” it seemed as if the walls were vibrating. But: the most perfect festival - a music week without all those “masterpieces” that are called immortal, although they are widely used or exploited according to the motto: “Take the same thing over and over again and make a corpse out of it” (Ernst Jandl).
Far more than a thousand works must have been performed in Husum in around two hundred concerts over the past 34 years. The fact that only six of them were on the program twice invalidates the objection that the founder and spiritus rector, the pianist Peter Froundjian, had to counter when he started his supposedly bulky concerts in 1987 - one year after the opening of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival " Beyond the mainstream ”began: That it would be more and more difficult to find black pearls in the chest of rarities and to lure music lovers to the distant“ gray city by the sea ”, as Theodor Storm called his place of birth. And yet, they came and they still come; “Pianophiles” who are not interested in the happy reflex of recognizing classic hits, but in discoveries and challenges.