SPANNUNGEN AT 20
20 years of Spannungen
© RWE
© Giorgia Bertazzi
Jessica Duchen speaks to Lars Vogt about his festival in Heimbach, which began in 1998
How did Spannungen begin? The first festival was held in 1998 and the planning for it started two years earlier. At the time I still lived in the area between Cologne and Aachen, just where the Eifel Mountains start. I had been to several of the famous chamber music festivals of the time – Lockenhaus, Risør, Stavanger – and I always loved being part of them. I thought that maybe one day I’d do a festival myself, trying to find the essence of the things I liked most about the others. I was careful to drop the idea of a festival somewhere in the Eifel region to the person who at the time ran the local cultural association of the city of Düren. Soon he was ringing me up every two months to say, “When shall we go and look for a place?”
26 The Green Room Summer 2018
How did you settle on Heimbach and the power station? Our special place had to have the right performance venue; it needed the right infrastructure; and it had to be a nice place, somewhere the musicians and their families would like to go! My colleague suggested first a castle in Heimbach, which the cultural association often used. It’s a beautiful place, and we have our rehearsals there, but it isn’t really big enough for the concerts. Next, we considered a church in Heimbach with old and new sections; we thought we could do concerts involving the different parts of the building, and I started inviting some artists – but it turned out that the church didn’t want any nonreligious music, so suddenly we had no venue! Then someone mentioned the power station.
I didn’t take it seriously at first, but when we went to check it out I discovered that it’s an astonishing building, Art Deco from 1904; it looks a bit like a cathedral of the industry of the time, and it’s by a lake with a mountain behind it. There’s plenty of room to put up the stage between the old turbines and make it into a concert hall. The acoustic needed some work, as the floor is tiled. I did a test recital and we put in a carpet; it was soon clear that the atmosphere was unique and it could be beautiful. We had to experiment before the first festival, with curtains and carpets, but now the acoustics are something special. I always enjoy it when I bring new artists and they see this astonishing power station for the first time.
