Carinthian summer

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The Carinthian Summer is a music and culture festival in the Austrian state of Carinthia . It was founded in Ossiach in 1969 and has since taken place annually in July and August in Ossiach, since 1972 in the city of Villach and since 2003 at other venues in Carinthia.

Program focus

The festival program was built on the focus of master concerts , chamber music and orchestral concerts as well as seminars and symposia.

A special feature of the program since 1974 has been the “Ossiach Church Opera”, with the Austrian premiere of Benjamin Britten's The Lost Son (1975) and world premieres (from 1982 mostly composition commissions for the festival) of sacred music theater works by contemporary Austrian composers (including Cesar Bresgen , Herbert Lauermann , Karl Heinz Füssl , Dieter Kaufmann , Kurt Schwertsik , Ivan Eröd , Peter Planyavsky , Thomas Daniel Schlee , Bruno Strobl , Gottfried von Eine ).

Chamber operas by contemporary composers were also premiered in Villach between 1993 and 2003 ( Gerhard Schedl , Wolfram Wagner , Hugo Käch , René Clemencic ).

In 1982 the "Carinthian Children's Summer" was founded, which was supposed to integrate children as active participants in the big festival.

The festival received an international reputation through world-famous soloists and conductors such as Claudio Abbado , Aigul Akhmetshina, Benjamin Appl , Leonard Bernstein , Karl Böhm , Yefim Bronfman , Grace Bumbry , Montserrat Caballé , José Carreras , René Clemencic , Alma Deutscher , Christoph von Dohnányi , and Vladimir Fedossejew , Bernarda Fink , Ádám Fischer , Sir James Galway , Bruno Ganz , Sir John Eliot Gardiner , Nicolai Gedda , Valery Gergiev , Emil Gilels , Martin Grubinger , Hilary Hahn , Hans and Martin Haselböck , Michael Heltau , Cyprien Katsaris , Lukas Kranzelbinder , Gidon Kremer , Elisabeth Leonskaja , Marjana Lipovšek , Lorin Maazel , Oleg Maisenberg , Mischa Maisky , Sir Neville Marriner , Zubin Mehta , Tobias Moretti , Riccardo Muti , Sir Roger Norrington , David Oistrach , Seiji Ozawa , Boris Pergamenschikow , Markus Poschner , Will Quadflieg , Ruggero Raimondi , Carole Dawn Reinhart , Katia Ricciarelli , Mstislaw Rostropowitsch , Peter Schreier , Horst Stein , Henryk Sze ryng and many more.

International orchestras were the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Mariinsky Orchestra St. Petersburg, Tchaikovsky Orchestra Moscow, Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. There were also guest performances by chamber operas such as the Moscow Chamber Opera, Scottish Opera and Warsaw Chamber Opera .

Venues

The main venues of the festival are the collegiate church Ossiach and the Congress Center Villach. Until 2003, games were played exclusively in Ossiach (collegiate church, baroque hall and knight's hall of the monastery, monastery courtyard and on board the motor ship MS Ossiach ) and in Villach (Congress Center, Bamberg hall of the former Parkhotel, St. Jakob parish church (Paracelsushof)). From 2004 the “Carinthian landscape” was expanded by opening up new venues in the vicinity of Ossiach and Villach ( Domenig Steinhaus , Bergkirche Tiffen , Schloss Damtschach ). In 2009, the Alban Berg Hall, which was added to the Ossiach Abbey, was added. Since 2016, rooms and gardens have also been used by Carinthian families and institutions for the “Salon Concerts” series.

history

The initiators and founders were the provisional parish priest Jakob Stingl from Ossiach, the musician (solo trumpeter of the Vienna Philharmonic) and manager Helmut Wobisch and Nikolaus Fheodoroff (composer, conductor, pianist and musical director of the ORF regional studio in Carinthia).

The founding concert in the collegiate church in Ossiach, the baroque sacred space and central location of the first years of the festival, was played by the pianist Wilhelm Backhaus on June 25, 1969 - as a benefit for the purchase of a new organ, which was inaugurated in 1971 and named Wilhelm-Backhaus- Memorial organ received.

In 1970 the Carinthian Summer Association was founded. The chairman of the association and artistic director in personal union was Helmut Wobisch until his death in 1980, who built up the festival, continuously enriched it programmatically (church opera as a "trademark" from 1974) and to international recognition (including the first European Leonard-Bernstein- Festival, 1977).

In 1972 the Drau town of Villach was added as a “second home” with its newly built congress center . The series of major orchestral concerts that have taken place there since then was opened by David Oistrakh and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra .

With Wobisch's death there was a separation between directorship and club management. The chairman of the club was the co-founder of the festival, Nikolaus Fheodoroff, who held this honorary position for 30 years (1980–2010).

In March 1980, the association appointed the theater scholar and cultural manager Gerda Fröhlich, who had been the festival's assistant since the beginning, as artistic director with sole artistic, organizational and financial responsibility, and at that time the first woman in such a position. She expanded the festival program beyond the classical track with commissions to contemporary Austrian composers for Ossiach church operas (12 world premieres) and for children's operas as part of the new focus “Carinthian Children's Summer”. After 24 seasons, she retired at the end of 2003.

She was followed in 2004 by the composer, organist and cultural manager Thomas Daniel Schlee , who continued to program church opera productions from the pen of international composers with composer portraits and introduced a new cycle of jazz and world music with “cs alternative” .

The musicologist and manager Holger Bleck has been the managing director of the Carinthian Summer since January 2016 . Music salons, picnic and station concerts take place at new venues, such as in Carinthian palaces and gardens. With the format: “CS on the move”, avant-garde arrangements of folk music in public space are offered free of charge on ÖBB routes. Jazz , cross-over and singer-songwriters are equally represented alongside classical music .

Artistic director / artistic director

Association / stewards

The following regular artists of the Carinthian Summer were named honorary members: Paul Badura-Skoda , Rudolf Buchbinder , Gottfried von Eine , Robert Holl , Christa Ludwig .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Carinthian Summer: History . Retrieved April 14, 2019.
  2. ^ Venues of the Carinthian Summer . Retrieved April 14, 2019.
  3. ^ Institute for art and music historical research: Fröhlich, Gerda. 2002, accessed April 14, 2019 .
  4. Holger Bleck designated CS director. ORF Carinthia, February 27, 2015, accessed on April 14, 2019 .