The Innsbruck Festival of Early Music (German: Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik) is a festival of historically informed performances of music from the late Renaissance, Baroque and early Classical periods which takes place annually in Innsbruck, Austria. It was founded in 1976. [1]
The festival had its roots in 1963 when the Innsbruck musician Otto Ulf (1907–1993) organized a concert at the Ambras Castle to celebrate the 600th anniversary of Margaret, Countess of Tyrol's bequest of Tyrol to the Dukes of Austria. The Ambras Castle concerts continued over the years and in 1972, he initiated an International Summer Academy in the city. The festival itself was established in 1976 with Ulf as its artistic director. Beginning in 1977 with Handel's Acis and Galatea , the festival's centerpiece has been the production of at least one baroque opera or oratorio. Since then it has played a pioneering role in the revival of Baroque opera. [2]
The Belgian conductor and early music specialist René Jacobs had organized the festival's opera programme from 1991, and was artistic director of the entire festival from 1997 to 2009. In 2010, Alessandro De Marchi succeeded Jacobs as artistic director. [3] Among the conductors who have appeared at the festival are Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Jordi Savall, Sigiswald Kuijken, John Eliot Gardiner and Alan Curtis.
Operas which have been performed at the festival (many of them in their first performance in modern times) include Cesti's L'Orontea and L'Argia , Cavalli's Giasone and Serse , Conti's Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena , Sartorio's Giulio Cesare in Egitto , Handel's Flavio and Rinaldo , Telemann's Orpheus ; Hasse's Solimano , Haydn's Il mondo della luna , Mozart's La finta semplice , and Gassmann's L'opera seria
The festival's concerts are often centered on a particular theme. Among those presented in 2015 were "Lachrimae" ("Tears"), melancholy arias and songs from the Baroque and Renaissance periods, and "Die Harfe der Kardinäle" ("The Cardinals' Harp"), 17th-century songs to harp accompaniment composed under the patronage of Cardinals Barberini and Montalto. [4]
In 2010, Alessandro De Marchi initiated the festival's International Singing Competition for Baroque Opera Pietro Antonio Cesti. Named for Antonio Cesti, a 17th-century Italian singer and composer who served at the Innsbruck court of Archduke Ferdinand Charles, the competition is open to young singers specialising in the performance of Baroque opera and has a top prize of €4000. Selected finalists also perform the following year in the festival's "Baroque Opera: Young" ("Barockoper: Jung") production which takes place in the inner courtyard of the University of Innsbruck's Theology Faculty. Past "Baroque Opera: Young" productions have included Cesti's Orontea , Lully's Armide , and a double-bill of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Blow's Venus and Adonis . [5] [6] Sebastian Schwarz, who has served as Chairman of the Jury was appointed General Director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera in November 2015. [7]
The festival takes place in several historic venues and churches in and around the city of Innsbruck.
Innsbruck is the capital of Tyrol and the fifth-largest city in Austria. On the River Inn, at its junction with the Wipp Valley, which provides access to the Brenner Pass 30 km (18.6 mi) to the south, it had a population of 132,493 in 2018.
Pietro Marc'Antonio Cesti, known today primarily as an Italian composer of the Baroque era, was also a singer (tenor), and organist. He was "the most celebrated Italian musician of his generation".
René Jacobs is a Belgian musician. He came to fame as a countertenor, but later in his career he became known as a conductor of baroque and classical opera.
Innsbruck is a city in the Austrian Alps whose musical heritage long played an important role in the music of Austria. Modern Innsbruck is home to the International Festival of Early Music, an Eastern music festival, the Summer Dance Festival, the Innsbruck International Choral Festival and the Ambras Castle Concerts. Other major music venues include the Tiroler Landestheater.
Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin is a German chamber orchestra founded in East Berlin in 1982. Each year Akamus gives approximately 100 concerts, ranging from small chamber works to large-scale symphonic pieces in Europe's musical centers as well as on tours in Asia, North America and South America.
Bejun Mehta is an American countertenor. He has been awarded the Echo Klassik, the Gramophone Award, Le Diamant d’Opera Magazine, the Choc de Classica, the Traetta Prize, and been nominated for the Grammy Award, the Laurence Olivier Award, and the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik. Writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Michael Stallknecht called him "arguably the best counter tenor in the world today."
Robin Blaze is an English countertenor.
Kobie van Rensburg is a South African tenor and opera director.
Janet Williams is an American soprano who has won international critical acclaim for performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Berlin Staatsoper, Paris Opera, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Opera de Lyon, Nice Opera, Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Opera Geneva, Frankfurt Opera, Cologne Opera, Leipzig Opera, San Francisco Opera, Washington Opera, Dallas Opera, and Michigan Opera Theatre as well as in concerts throughout Europe, North America, Canada, Israel and Japan with conductors including Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Myung-whun Chung, Philippe Herreweghe, René Jacobs, Marek Janowski, Neeme Järvi, Raymond Leppard, Fabio Luisi, Sir Neville Marriner, Nicholas McGegan, Zubin Mehta, Kent Nagano, John Nelson, Donald Runnicles, Gerard Schwarz and Michael Tilson Thomas.
Alessandro De Marchi is an Italian conductor, best known for his interpretation of baroque oratorios and operas, as leader of the Academia Montis Regalis orchestra, and director of the orchestra's foundation in Mondovì, Mons Regalis, one of the oldest towns of Piedmont. He was a student of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Since 2010 De Marchi has succeeded René Jacobs as director of the Innsbruck Festwochen der Alten Musik.
Difendere l'offensore overo La Stellidaura vendicante is an opera by Francesco Provenzale. It is one of only two operas by Provenzale to survive.
Steven Cole is an American opera singer. He is particularly known for his portrayal of tenor character roles in an international career spanning more than 30 years. He sang in the world premieres of Jean Prodromides's La Noche Triste, Gavin Bryars's Medea, and the revised version of György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre.
Matthias Rexroth is a German countertenor and voice teacher. Winning 1st prizes at the Francisco-Viñas in Barcelona and the 'Belvedere Competition' in Vienna in 2000, preceded an extensive international performing and teaching career.
David Hansen is an Australian countertenor.
Jennifer Rivera is an American mezzo-soprano who has had an active international performance career in operas and concerts since the early 2000s.
L'Argia is an opera in a prologue and three acts composed by Antonio Cesti to a libretto by Giovanni Filippo Apolloni. It was first performed in the court theatre at Innsbruck on 4 November 1655 to celebrate the visit of Queen Christina of Sweden who was on her way to exile in Rome. Over the next 20 years it had multiple performances in Italian cities including Venice and Siena where it inaugurated Siena's new opera house in 1669. Its first performance in modern times took place at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music in 1996. Set on the Island of Cyprus in ancient times the opera's convoluted plot, full of disguises and mistaken identities, revolves around the amorous misadventures of Selino who has been pursued to Salamis by his deserted wife Princess Argia.
Sebastian F. Schwarz is a German-born musician, teacher and administrator.
Giovanni Filippo Apolloni was an Italian poet and librettist. Born in Arezzo, he has sometimes been referred to as "Giovanni Apollonio Apolloni", but the second given name is spurious. He served as the court poet to Ferdinand Charles, Archduke of Austria at Innsbruck form 1653 until 1659. On his return to Italy he entered the service of Cardinal Volumnio Bandinelli. After Bandinelli's death in 1667 Appolloni was in the service of the Chigi family in Rome and Siena for the rest of his life. He wrote the librettos for a number of operas, the most well-known of which were Antonio Cesti's L'Argia and La Dori, as well as several oratorios and the texts for cantatas by both Cesti and Alessandro Stradella.
La Dori, overo Lo schiavo reggio is a tragi-comic opera in a prologue and three acts composed by Antonio Cesti to a libretto by Giovanni Filippo Apolloni. It was first performed in the court theatre at Innsbruck in 1657. The story is set in Babylon on the shores of the Euphrates and is a convoluted tale of mistaken identities—a female protagonist who disguised as a man eventually regains her lost lover, and a man disguised as a woman who causes another man to fall in love with him. In several respects it resembles the plot of Cesti and Apolloni's earlier opera L'Argia and foreshadows Apostolo Zeno's libretto for Gli inganni felici (1695) and Metastasio's libretto for L'Olimpiade (1733). The first Italian staging of La Dori was in Florence in 1661 for the wedding of Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. It subsequently became one of the most popular operas in 17th-century Italy. The opera was revived three times in the 20th century, beginning in 1983.
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