Heidelberg Spring

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The Heidelberg Spring International Music Festival has been a classical music festival that has been held in Heidelberg every March and April since 1997, with over 100 events and 47,000 visitors (2018). In addition to the festival productions and concerts with internationally established performers, ensembles and orchestras, the “Heidelberger Frühling”, organized as a non-profit company, designs and organizes other projects such as the Heidelberg String Quartet Festival, the Heidelberg Festival Academy for Lied, Chamber Music, Composition and Music Journalism and Heidelberg Music Conference, an annual meeting of major European festivals and concert halls. The managing director is Thorsten Schmidt. The Heidelberg Spring is part of the Rhein-Neckar festival region .

history

The first “Heidelberg Spring” took place in 1997. After the first two years with the Philharmonic Orchestra, the music festival became independent. Heidelberger Frühling gGmbH was founded in March 2006 . The Heidelberg Spring Foundation was launched in 2010 and in 2011 the Friends of the Heidelberg Spring celebrated its 10th anniversary. In 2016 the festival celebrated its 20th birthday.

String Quartet Festival

Since 2005, the Heidelberg String Quartet Festival has been creating an atmosphere of concentrated deceleration, of coexistence between artists and visitors, of immersion in the genre of string quartet. From morning to night, outstanding ensembles create the demanding program of workshops, lectures and concerts. While the String Quartet Festival initially took place as part of the Heidelberger Frühling music festival, it has been a small festival of its own since 2012, always for four days at the end of January. Four to five ensembles are invited each year, with established quartets meeting young newcomers. The workshops are currently being held by radio presenter, director and screenwriter Daniel Finkernagel and the violinist Oliver Wille ( Kuss Quartet ) and deal in-depth with questions of design and interpretation. The venue for the string quartet festival is the old Heidelberg University of Education , known for this purpose as the festival forum, which offers a concert hall and rehearsal rooms as well as a festival cafeteria which serves as a meeting point for all artists and guests between and after the events.

Festival Academy

The festival academy, founded in 2011, is the creative center of the Heidelberg Spring. Here young outstanding musicians from all over the world come together to make music together, to exchange ideas, to find and pass on inspiration, to reflect and to make new contacts. The Festival Academy sees itself as a place of connection, opening and deepening. It deals with music in its socio-political dimension, makes processes of creation visible and stimulates discourse about its meaning and perspectives. Open classes and open stages, workshop concerts and roundtables - in these and other formats, the audience can get to know the young artists at work and look over the shoulder of the mentors.

The Festival Akademie des Heidelberger Frühling comprises four areas: song (artistic director: Thomas Hampson ), chamber music (artistic director: Igor Levit ), composition (successor to the Heidelberg studio, artistic director: Matthias Pintscher ) and music journalism (since 2015, director: Eleonore Büning ). Mentors of current and past academy classes are Barbara Bonney , Ian Bostridge , Brigitte Fassbaender , Graham Johnson , Thomas Quasthoff , Wolfram Rieger , Veronika Eberle , Ning Feng, Matan Porat, Thorleif Thedéen, Frederic Rzewski , Manuel Brug and Sophie Diesselhorst. There are also numerous specialist speakers from the humanities.

Song focus

Heidelberg is known as the city of songs - not least because of Clemens Brentanos and Achim von Arnim's collection of songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn . That is why the Heidelberg Spring has set itself the task of making the genre of the art song , which many perceive as hermetic, accessible to a wider audience again. The founding of the International Song Center Heidelberg in February 2016 bundles these activities. One of the first projects of the Liedzentrum is one of the most renowned competitions for lieder singing - Thomas Quasthoff's International Song Competition Das Lied , which has been held every two years since 2009 and took place in Heidelberg for the first time in 2017.

The festival has a prominent comrade in the American baritone Thomas Hampson , who has been closely associated with Heidelberg and Heidelberg Spring since the “Wunderhorn Week” in 2006. In the past, several interpretation courses and symposia with young singing students have taken place under his direction, and since 2011 Hampson has been artistic director of the Lied Akademie des Heidelberger Frühling. In addition to the Lied Academy, numerous classical song recitals have always been on the program. In the past, almost all the great song interpreters could be heard in the Neckarstadt, including Annette Dasch , Jonas Kaufmann , Christine Schäfer , Christian Gerhaher , Christoph Prégardien , Thomas Hampson and many others. In addition to established names, emerging new discoveries in Heidelberg will also receive a podium, such as the soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller and the baritone Andrè Schuen .

It is a particular concern of the festival to work out approaches to what the tradition of the song in its diverse forms still has to say to us today and in the future. This is reflected in the “Lied.Lab” format introduced in 2015, in which young singers are given conceptual freedom to develop their personal vision of what the recital of the future should look like for them. An experiment with new forms, unusual locations, surprising combinations and breaking down boundaries.

Music mediation by young people for young people

Under the name “Classic Scouts”, young people between the ages of 14 and 18 have been familiarizing their peers with “spring” since 2008 and trying to get them excited about classical music. They give concert introductions and accompany young classical music newbies on their first concert visit. You interview festival artists and write articles for the “Classic Scouts Journal” of the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung . You will experience artists at rehearsals, artist meetings and workshops, sometimes also in schools, and create their own evening as part of the festival, from conception to execution. The project has been funded by the SAS Institute from the start . In addition, the trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich donated the money of the Pfalzpreis awarded to him in 2014 to the youth project. In October 2015, the Heidelberg Spring was awarded the ECHO Klassik in the youth development category for the “Classic Scouts” project .

Heidelberg Music Conference

Since 2013, the Heidelberg Spring has been holding a two-day conference for the classical concert and festival industry during the festival period. The Heidelberg Music Conference is dedicated to a different topic every year.

  • 2013: "Festivals 3.0 - an opportunity to shape the future?", Gerard Mortier held the opening keynote
  • 2014: “Creating something new instead of copy & paste”, including with architect and trained musician Daniel Libeskind
  • 2015: "Art is free - but for how much longer?"
  • 2018: "The cult of the special - How a changing society is revolutionizing the relationship between the music business and the public"

Heidelberg Spring Music Prize

The Heidelberg Spring Music Prize has existed since 2013. The award is endowed with 10,000 euros and is given annually alternately to cultural workers or cultural journalists who make substantial and lasting efforts to convey classical music. Previous winners are:

Guiding principle

  • 1997 Brahms Festival
  • 1998 text and beat
  • 1999 turning mark I.
  • 2000 turning mark II
  • 2001 Liberated from the ice
  • 2002 Between time and eternity
  • 2003 bill and game
  • 2004 From the New World
  • 2005 dialogues
  • 2006 The thoughts are free
  • 2007 The own and the foreign
  • 2008 nuances
  • 2009 identity
  • 2010 Oh Europe
  • 2011 change of time
  • 2012 metamorphoses
  • 2013 perspectives
  • 2014 parallel stories
  • 2015 Dare to be free
  • 2016 essential gifts
  • 2017 In a foreign country
  • 2018 freedom
  • 2019 How do we want to live?
  • 2020 on the go

Venues

Since its inception, the Heidelberg Spring has taken place in almost 50 locations in Heidelberg and the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region . The festival center is the Kongresshaus Stadthalle Heidelberg from the Wilhelminian era, other locations currently used include the auditorium of the Old University of Heidelberg , the Old Heidelberg University of Education , the HebelHalle and Halle02 and the Old Indoor Swimming Pool (Heidelberg) . The venues can be recognized by the green flags during the festival. In the past, the festival's unusual concert venues were the atrium of the research and development center of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG , the Operon Auditorium European Laboratory for Molecular Biology , Studio Villa Bosch , the Stadtgarten restaurant, the company building of BASF SE Ludwigshafen, and the bakery of the Mantei bakery .

financing

The city of Heidelberg is a partner in Heidelberger Frühling gGmbH and, together with the state of Baden-Württemberg , provides around 22.6% of the budget of around 4.52 million euros (as of October 2018) through an annual grant. The Heidelberger Frühling generates 77.4% of the budget from its own income (primarily income from the sale of admission tickets, media rights and advertisements in print products), fundraising and sponsoring.

An essential element of the fundraising is the circle of friends of Heidelberger Frühling e. V., which has existed since 2001 and in which more than 1000 companies and private individuals have come together to support the festival on the part of Heidelberg's economy and citizens.

The main sponsors of Heidelberg Spring are HeidelbergCement as a founding partner, MLP AG , Octapharma and SAP SE .

Web links

Commons : Heidelberger Frühling  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sophia Pick: International Music Festival “Heidelberg Spring” 2019. March 16 to April 14, 2010. Press kit . Heidelberg, International Music Festival Heidelberger Frühling gGmbH. Status: October 2018. Page 7 ( [1] ).
  2. ↑ Scholarship recipients selected for “Heidelberger Frühling” 2012 , musik-heute.de, accessed on December 10, 2011.
  3. ↑ International Lied Center Heidelberg ( archive link ( memento of the original July 24, 2017 Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested Please review the original and archive link under. Instructions and then remove this notice. ) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.heidelberger-fruehling.de
  4. ↑ Das Lied - International Song Competition: [2]
  5. ↑ Price for the promotion of young talent ( Memento of the original dated December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed November 28, 2015.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.echoklassik.de
  6. ^ Heidelberg Music Conference. Retrieved November 25, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Heidelberg Spring Music Prize. Retrieved November 25, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Heidelberg Spring Music Prize ( [3] ).
  9. ↑ Press kit Internationales Musikfestival Heidelberger Frühling gGmbH. P. 7 , accessed November 25, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Birgit Sommer: 1000 members - The big goal has been achieved. In: Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. April 4, 2018. Retrieved November 25, 2018 .