The Klavier-Festival Ruhr (also Klavierfestival Ruhr) is an annual festival of piano music, which takes place in the area of the Ruhr in Germany. The festival runs from around the beginning of May for three months. The organizer of the festival is the Stiftung Klavier-Festival Ruhr, and the art leader is Franz Xaver Ohnesorg. The festival was founded in July 1988.
For three months, starting in May, daily classical music or jazz pieces are performed at different locations by internationally known pianists as well as newcomers. The performance locations include classical music halls (such as Konzerthaus Dortmund, Musiktheater im Revier, Gelsenkirchen, Tonhalle Düsseldorf); the castle Schloss Herten; several museums (one being the Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History) and parks like the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. [1] [2] Locations include some unconventional venues as well, including the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex (a World Heritage Site).
Pianists at this festival are newcomers, but also well known artists like Alice Sara Ott, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Fazıl Say, Hélène Grimaud, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, [3] Plamena Mangova [4] or Lang Lang. [5]
The festival is sponsored by several locally based Industrial companies. Klavierfestival Ruhr organizes around 80 concerts, and has an yearly budget of roughly one million Euro. The festival hosts about 60,000 visitors yearly.
The focus of the festival 2018 was french music. [6]
Düsseldorf is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in the state and the seventh-largest city in Germany, with a population of 644,280.
The Ruhr, also referred to as the Ruhr area, sometimes Ruhr district, Ruhr region, or Ruhr valley, is a polycentric urban area in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population density of 2,800/km2 and a population of over 5 million (2017), it is the largest urban area in Germany. It consists of several large cities bordered by the rivers Ruhr to the south, Rhine to the west, and Lippe to the north. In the southwest it borders the Bergisches Land. It is considered part of the larger Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region of more than 10 million people, which is the third largest in Europe, behind only London and Paris.
Dortmund is the third-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne and Düsseldorf, and the eighth-largest city of Germany, with a population of 588,250 inhabitants as of 2021. It is the largest city of the Ruhr, Germany's largest urban area with some 5.1 million inhabitants, as well as the largest city of Westphalia. On the Emscher and Ruhr rivers, it lies in the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region and is considered the administrative, commercial, and cultural center of the eastern Ruhr. Dortmund is the second-largest city in the Low German dialect area after Hamburg.
The Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region is the largest metropolitan region in Germany, with over ten million inhabitants. A polycentric conurbation with several major urban concentrations, the region covers an area of 7,110 square kilometres (2,750 sq mi), entirely within the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region spreads from the Ruhr area (Dortmund-Bochum-Essen-Duisburg) in the north to the urban areas of the cities of Mönchengladbach, Düsseldorf, Wuppertal, Leverkusen, Cologne, and Bonn in the south. The location of the Rhine-Ruhr at the heart of the European Blue Banana makes it well connected to other major European cities and metropolitan areas such as the Randstad, the Flemish Diamond and the Frankfurt Rhine Main Region.
Unna is a city of around 59,000 people in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, the seat of the Unna district.
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