Vladimir Tarnopolsky on the first Moscow Forum festival

The programmes of the first Forums were built as a dialogue between contemporary Russian music and the music of a specially invited guest country. For each festival a particular theme was chosen, one that was relevant to the situation at the time. Our first “window on Europe” was the 1994 festival, held under the title “Russian–Dutch Musical Assemblies”. Such a grand title, with its allusions to the great age of Peter the Great, sounds rather amusing today, of course, when you recall that the festival was put together quite literally “on our knees”: we had neither a rehearsal space nor even a writing desk. The conservatory had a single fax machine, which mostly did not work. Posters were written by hand on the back of announcements for earlier concerts, and a booklet was out of the question! That is why, sadly, no documentation of our first festival has survived.
For the Dutch, too, the festival turned out to be a “window” — a window onto a Russia that had previously been unknown and inaccessible to them. A whole Dutch landing party descended on Moscow: two ensembles — de Volharding and the Maarten Altena Ensemble — and a dozen composers and musicologists! For us, raised on the puritanical notions of the 1950s that the avant-garde is always something “terribly serial” and indigestible for audiences, the encounter with an entirely different avant-garde — free of any dogma, turning easily and naturally to a variety of styles and not shying away from so-called “applied” genres, from jazz to rock — was a true revelation.