When the Mizmorim Chamber Music Festival once again transforms Basel into a place of musical encounters in January 2026, the focus will be on a city whose name carries longing, pain and utopia at the same time: Jerusalem. Shalom - Salam. Two terms that carry the same desire: peace. At a time when the Holy City is being severely tested, the festival is a conscious sign of hope. It invites you to hear Jerusalem anew, not through the headlines, but through its sounds, stories and cultural interdependencies.
The festival opens with David Krakauer and Kathleen Tagg, whose project Visions of Tomorrow fuses Jewish and Arabic melodies through improvisation. Their music forms the bracket for the entire program: it combines tradition and the present, identity and openness - a musical dialogue against silencing. In the opening concert, The Ties That Bind Us, these perspectives are condensed into a deeply moving homage to the vision of a peaceful coexistence of religions.
A special focus will be on the 100th birthday of Morton Feldman. Two concerts pay tribute to his work - from the ascetic miniatures to the floating patterns of the famous Why Patterns? Feldman's music, with its crystalline delicacy, opens up a space for concentrated listening in which silence and sound mirror each other.
Vocal ensemble Voces Suaves © Daniele Caminiti
The cultural polyphony of Jerusalem also finds an impressive echo: folk songs, Bach cantatas and a new work by composer Marcelo Nisinman intertwine in Yerushalayim shel zahav. The vocal ensemble Voces Suaves unfolds the spiritual resonances of the city in a ten-hundred-year-old panorama of sacred music - finely illuminated by weaving oud improvisations.
Contemporary voices such as Samir Odeh-Tamimi and André Hajdu set powerful accents of remembrance, while the piano recital Remembrance for Forgetting honors György Kurtág on his anniversary. Young ensembles are the focus of Rough Surfaces, the new international string quartet masterclass, which gives the festival an additional future dimension.
With the puppet theater Journey to Jerusalem, the festival also opens up to the youngest - a poetic approach to the stories of the city. The program is complemented by lectures, museum tours and archive visits that make the cultural and historical depths of Jerusalem tangible.
Mizmorim 2026 will thus become a place for listening, learning and thinking ahead: a musical plea for the possibility of peace - and powerful proof that hope sounds.
January 21 to 25, 2026
www.mizmorim.com
Mauricio Silva Orendain, composer and musician © Song Yi
