11.09. 7:00 PM Festival and Congress Centre, Hall 1
Concentus Musicus Wien
Artistic Director Stefan Gottfried
Program “Concentus musicus sacro-profanus”
Works by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Romanus Weichlein, Georg Muffat
Under the Honorary Patronage of H.E. Mag. Andrea Ikić-Böhm – Ambassador of Austria in Bulgaria
With the kind support of the Austrian Cultural Forum Sofia (лого)
Concentus musicus Wien, founded in 1953 by the world-famous conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt and his wife Alice, is among the pioneers who paved the way for the success of the historically informed performance movement and still remains at the forefront of historical performing practice. The ensemble’s musicians spent more than four years rehearsing as to fine-tune their sound and arrive at an authentic interpretation of works from the baroque and pre-baroque eras before giving their debut concert in 1957 at the Palais Schwarzenberg in Vienna. That event soon launched an annual series of concerts in Vienna, tours all over Europe and a multitude of recordings. They had purposely chosen to name the ensemble “Consentus musicus”, meaning “harmony, to sound together“.
They keep searching, experimenting, discovering and presenting to the audience almost forgotten and rarely performed pieces from the early music’s treasury with passion and knowledge
The works they have chosen to present in Varna include pieces by the Austrian composer Johan Schmelzer who exemplifies the polyphonic traditions during the first half of XVIIth century. His music had greatly influenced later German and Austrian composers; among those was Heinrich Biber, also a virtuoso violinist and composer whose musical language paved the way to Pachelbel and Bach. Bieber’s contemporary Romanus Weichlein is also presented in this concert – he managed to build his own unique style (being a composer and a Benedictine monk). George Muffat is the last composer in this selection – French-born who considers himself a German, he left four important collections published between 1682 and 1698 – Sonata from the earliest of them “Armonico tribute” will conclude the program.
The program consists of works, which were created, inspired and first presented under the auspices of the Habsburg dynasty during the heyday of this period.
Pure devotion to sacred music together with the pure joy from performing it for the royal court – that’s the intersection of all the pieces in this carefully chosen program by one of the leading baroque ensembles.
