Long before the first note of the Usedom Music Festival sounds this year, the hosts land a coup of a very special kind: the New York Philharmonic give their first European guest performance after a two-year abstinence abroad on the north-east German island of sunshine and culture, leaving the three big concerts in the Peenemünde power station were followed by chamber music encounters in Heringsdorf and Wolgast.
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festival program for Usedom
This residency series is rightly the pride of the Usedom festival organisers, who had persistently campaigned for the top-class visitors for years. Intendant Thomas Hummel, as a visionary, “infected” all of his fellow campaigners with “ideas that you don’t even dare to think of at first”, says hotelier Rolf Seelige-Steinhoff, chairman of the Usedom Music Friends Association. The guest performance of the New York Philharmonic now crowns the season-extending profile between the Usedom Literature Days in spring and the Usedom Music Festival in autumn, which this time takes place from September 17th to October 8th. Advance sales for events dedicated to Estonia this year will begin on Saturday.
Big promise for music fans
Once again it will be shown that “small countries are often musical giants,” promises festival spokesman Alexander Datz. Dramaturg Jan Brachmann arouses curiosity about the complex culture of the northernmost Baltic country. “We want to depict the entire historical wealth of Estonia,” he refers to the checkered history of the country, which has been independent again since 1991, and which has been influenced by German, Danish and Russian influences.
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From the “original instrument” Kannel (a kind of tremor), which sounds on October 2 under the motto “Bach in Estonian” in the Atelier Otto Niemeyer-Holstein near Koserow, the range extends to traces of Baltic German history or music from Estonia’s first period of independence the 1920s to the German premiere of “Lap of the immense light” at the final concert on October 8th with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra.
Song festival planned in Wolgast
In addition, the audience will experience “the most well-known artists of the present from Estonia”, announces Brachmann and does not just mean conductor Kristjan Järvi, who will be 50 years old in the summer and conduct the opening concert of the festival with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic on September 17th. Among others, the prominent singer-songwriter Mari Kalkun and the sports reporter and jazz pianist Joel Remmel are expected at the festival.
More than 20 venues on the island (including churches and hotels and also the cultural center in Swinoujscie, Poland) will be considered for around 35 concerts with a good 350 participants – almost 100 alone at the Estonian song festival on September 24 in Wolgast. It was deliberately not a professional ensemble that was invited, but the choir of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, explains Brachmann: “We want to show how deeply Estonian culture is rooted in amateur creativity”; especially in a people who were not allowed to speak their own language for a long time and about whom the composer Jüri Reinvere said: “You can at least sing about what you can’t talk about.”
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Another chapter will be opened when actress Martina Gedeck reads from Viivi Luik’s novel “The Seventh Peace Spring” in Heringsdorf on October 2nd: written in the perestroika atmosphere of the 1980s, it tells of the early Stalin period in Estonia from the perspective of a little girl who – according to the hosts – “faces everything terrible with cheeky impartiality”.
Music prize goes to young Estonian violinist
A musical experiment with a beach concert in Ahlbeck is just as much part of the festival program as a musical island tour to the Usedomer Achterland, a synagogue tour to Dargun and Stavenhagen or projects with schoolchildren – and last but not least, the Usedom Music Prize. The 23-year-old Hans Christian Aavik, according to Brachmann “currently one of the most talented violinists in Europe” will receive it. He will be performing in Karlshagen and Heringsdorf together with his piano (and life) partner Karolina Zhukova.
The festival program is published at www.usedomer-musikfestival.de. Tickets are available from Saturday at all advance booking offices with the ticket portal reservix.de, in the spa administrations of the island of Usedom and in the festival office in the Villa Irmgard in Heringsdorf, Maxim-Gorki-Straße 13.
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