Promoting the neglected chamber music repertoire

Traces was founded by violinist Philippe Graffin and members of the Karski Quartet. It is a project dedicated to promoting unjustly neglected chamber music repertoire and providing performance opportunities for young talented artists.

The first Traces festival took place in Brussels in 2019, featuring eight concerts that were enthusiastically received by audiences. During the pandemic, Traces produced the project and film À la valse, based on George Enescu’s Octet for Strings, Op. 7, and commissioned an arrangement of Ravel’s La Valse from composer Tim Mulleman.

Since then, further editions of Traces have taken place, and a recording dedicated to Viennese composers is planned for 2026.

This festival, Traces, takes its origin from a glimpse of hope: to the sound of Jeanne Moreau’s voice, uttering the last closing words in Marcel Ophuls’s documentary on Klaus Barbie. "This motion picture is dedicated to the late Madame Bontout, a good neighbour".

Madame Bontout, neighbour to the Kaddouche family, had attempted to save one of their daughters during a "raffle" in Lyon, in the second world war. Today, a similar hope resonates through the joyful picture of a young migrant from Syria, all bundled up in the snow in Brussels, displayed last year during a Jewish Museum exhibition.

How can a musician today be a good neighbour? There are probably many answers, but for a start, perhaps, a sense of duty towards remembrance.

The trumpets of fame draw us towards the pinnacles of the repertoire, where a very few composers, in fact always the same, keep the public’s interest through the test of, rather unconcerned, times. Yet, what happens when such a talented composer as Erwin Schulhof disappears prematurely in a nazi concentration camp? Or what occurs after the marvellous and well respected austrian composers Karl Weigl and his wife Waly find themselves anonymous in the United States after having fled the Anschluss?

This festival is our duty. The duty of playing the music of those who have, silently, left a few signs on some hidden pages like bottles to the sea before disappearing.

Philippe Graffin