Inside the Festival Where Music Meets Diplomacy

Erik Mirzoyan, a 21-year-old Armenian clarinetist, is a member of the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra, or PCYO, an 80-piece ensemble created as a central element of a classical music festival held every September in Tsinandali, Georgia. He was born in Moscow. During this year’s festival, Mirzoyan had a desire to play the Mozart clarinet quintet, so he recruited four of his fellow PCYO musicians to perform it with him. For the viola part, he enlisted Humay Hacizade, a young woman born in Azerbaijan, a country that has been in bloody conflict with Armenia for more than 30 years.

Despite the enmity of their nations, there is a warm camaraderie between the two musicians, a consequence of making music together.

On the evening of Sept. 3, the Mozart quintet was performed for the public in a free outdoor concert. Early the next morning, a Russian air attack killed seven people in Lviv, Ukraine. It so happened that one of the two violinists Mirzoyan had invited to play in the quintet was Oleh Yuzkiv, who was born in Lviv. Yuzkiv is well aware of Mirzoyan’s Russian heritage. Their mutual friendship, also formed through musical collaboration, remains intact.

“It was amazing,” Mirzoyan says of the quintet performance. “We combined all the countries and had this immediate connection. There was no thought of nationality, and in music there never should be. We should play music to heal people and touch the finest strings of their souls.”

Cultural diplomacy is precisely the reason the PCYO was created in 2019, the inaugural year of the festival, held on a historic estate in the bucolic village of Tsinandali, about 65 miles from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. The leaders of the festival, a happy confluence of businesspeople, musicians and artistic directors, speak of the “peace-promoting mission” of the youth orchestra — and mean it. This year, the PCYO was made up of musicians between the ages of 18 and 28, from eight counties in a region rife with conflict. Three Caucasus nations, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, are represented, along with five neighboring countries, Ukraine, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Moldova. (Hence the name Pan-Caucasian.) Next year, a ninth country, Uzbekistan, may be added.

The humanitarian raison d’être of the PCYO might be incentive enough to draw visitors to the festival, but equally remarkable is the proficiency of the orchestra. This is due not in small measure to the conductor Claudio Vandelli, who travels from city to city in the participating countries to audition prospective members, with an uncanny instinct for scouting young talent. The festival has a coaching staff made up almost entirely of first chair players at major orchestras – including, for example, Nancy Wu, associate concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Gianandrea Noseda, a conductor of international regard, named Conductor of the Year in 2015 by Musical America, is the festival’s music director. Members of the youth orchestra speak of him with adoration, and his joy in conducting the ensemble is evident. His delight was apparent during his final concert at this year’s festival, when he led the PCYO in a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 – challenging fare for any orchestra. Noseda had conducted the work earlier this year with the New York Philharmonic, and he says the quality of the PCYO performance “was not very far from the level of the Philharmonic. It was really inspiring.” (It was also the first time Mahler’s Fourth had ever been performed in Georgia, according to David Sakvarelidze, the general director of the festival.)

In only six years, the Tsinandali Festival has established itself as one of Europe’s most noteworthy summer classical music festivals – a signal achievement in a crowded field. It is frequently compared to the midsummer festival in the mountain resort of Verbier, Switzerland, and for good reason – Swedish-born Martin Engstroem and Israeli-born Avi Shoshani, who cofounded the Verbier Festival in 1994, were the creators of the Tsinandali Festival, and serve every year as co-artistic directors.

“We know how to make a festival,” Shoshani says. “But the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra, that was Martin’s brilliant idea.” Verbier also has a resident youth orchestra, but it is open to applicants from all over the world. “Martin said, ‘If we bring here people who usually don’t sit together, Armenians with Turks, then there is the point.’”

The point has not been lost on a number of A-list classical soloists, who come to Tsinandali in large part to support the peace project. “People believe in what we’re doing in this troubled region,” Engstroem says. This year, those guests included violinists Joshua Bell and Kristóf Baráti; pianists Mikhail Pletnev, Alexandre Kantorow, Boris Giltburg, Bruce Liu and Jeremy Denk; cellists Steven Isserlis and Edgar Moreau; oboist François Leleux; and other big names. (Pianist Sir András Schiff cancelled his scheduled appearance at the last minute due to illness.) Bell, Kantorow, Leleux and Moreau all performed concertos with the PCYO.

The idyllic setting of the festival, on 12 acres of lush heritage parkland, is also an attraction for performers and concertgoers. In the 19th century, the Tsinandali Estate was the property of Prince Alexander Chavchavadze, a Georgian aristocrat and poet. Houseguests to his Italianate palace included French novelist Alexandre Dumas, who called Tsinandali “a paradise.” The estate fell into disrepair during the Soviet Era and was left in ruins after the 1991 collapse of the USSR. Renovation began in 2007, under the leadership of George Ramishvili, chairman of the Georgian investment group Silk Road. By the time the festival was launched in 2019, the Tsinandali Estate had been restored to its former glory.

Shoshani credits Ramishvili for making the festival a reality. “Martin and I were very impressed by his vision,” he says. “Everything we asked for, he said, ‘I’ll do it.’ And he did.” That included building a 1200-seat roofed amphitheater, a 600-seat chamber music hall, a luxury hotel for guests, and a smaller hotel, with practice rooms, for the youth orchestra. Festival director Sakvarelidze, formerly the head of the Tbilisi Opera House, was another driving force in accomplishing the goals set out by Engstroem and Shoshani.

Having an amphitheater as the main concert hall proved to be a lucky break in 2020 and 2021, the second and third years of festival, when the coronavirus pandemic led to massive shutdowns of enclosed performance spaces. “We had to do everything we could not to cancel,” says festival executive manager Maya Lomadze. “The festival was too young to afford that.” Though PCYO performances were suspended for those two years, the festival continued, with chamber music in 2020 and a more robust program in 2021.

Georgia, meanwhile, was making impressive inroads in establishing itself as a tourist destination. In 2019, before the pandemic hit, the country received a record 9.3 million foreign visitors – nearly three times the national population. Some travelers come to visit the country’s ancient monasteries and cathedrals, others for its national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. The Kakheti region of eastern Georgia, in which Tsinandali is situated, is renowned for its vineyards; tourist brochures call Kakheti a “wine-lover’s dream.” The Tsinandali concert halls sit atop a historic wine cellar. Georgia has a high rating for safety from the U.S. State Department, and in the post-Soviet bloc countries, safety is no small matter.

The word is frequently invoked at the Tsinandali Festival. Nino Ochigava, a Georgian-born flutist in the PCYO, says Tsinandali is “the safest place for us to make music. We are all friends here.” Nevertheless, the instability of the region remains a source of anxiety, as Ochigava herself knows too well – she is the only musician in the family, and both her parents are soldiers.

In 2008, Russia seized 20% of Georgian land in a five-day war. While anti-Russian sentiment runs high in Georgia, there are fears that the governing Georgian Dream party is eroding the country’s relationship with the West and leaning dangerously toward appeasing Russia. On Sept. 26, billboards put up by Georgian Dream showed a split screen – a bombed-out Ukrainian city on the left, peaceful Tbilisi on the right – with the clear implication to be drawn. The ad campaign was greeted with disgust by the opposition party, which strongly supports Ukraine’s resistance to Russian occupation. The opposition will challenge Georgian Dream in a parliamentary election on Oct. 26.

Georgia’s political unrest was a topic of conversation during this year’s Tsinandali Festival, but a mood of optimism was pervasive during the nine days of music-making. This was only natural at an assemblage founded on a hopeful experiment in cultural diplomacy. “I don’t know if music can change the world,” Noseda said a few days after conducting Mahler’s Fourth. “But it has the power to change the hearts and minds of people.”