With Nuremberg’s Grand Musical Night, the ION Festival and the radio and television broadcaster BR-KLASSIK aim to take early music beyond the traditional concert hall and bring it into public life. Thorsten Preuß, deputy head of music at BR/ARD’s Nuremberg studio, reflects on the event, what it represents, and his broadcaster’s commitment to early music.
John Eliot Gardiner has just completed a European tour with his new ensemble, Constellation, featuring a Bach trilogy: two cantatas and the Easter Oratorio. A year and a half after his departure from the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra (which he founded in 1964), he reflects on this new musical and human adventure. He will be performing at the Royal Chapel in Versailles on 11 and 12 June.
To mark Pygmalion’s 20th anniversary, Raphaël Pichon conceived a unique pilgrimage: to retrace on foot, along with his musicians, the journey that the young Johann Sebastian Bach undertook in 1705 from Arnstadt to Lübeck, in northern Germany, to further his musical education under the great Dietrich Buxtehude. After a first stage in Thuringia in 2024, which resonated widely through ARTE and France Musique, Raphaël Pichon and his ensemble are now setting off once again for Wolfenbüttel, Lüneburg, and Lübeck, in northern Germany.
PassiSparsi are Italian and unapologetically unconventional. This vocal quartet has chosen a little-known Renaissance polyphonic repertoire: the morescas, irreverent secular songs that composer Orlando di Lasso wrote following a stay in Naples. Discover the mystery of PassiSparsi’s black cat in this many-voiced interview.
On May 14 and 15, Les Épopées and Stéphane Fuget bring Queen Dido back to the Tunis Opera House in her homeland, since, according to Purcell’s opera—based on Virgil’s Aeneid—she was the one who founded the nearby city of Carthage. This new production is distinctive in combining the ensemble’s historically informed performance practice with Middle Eastern music and dance.
From silence as a prerequisite for music to a questioning of authenticity, Paul Van Nevel, at the age of 80, continues his rigorous exploration of early music, while his leading tenor, Achim Schulz, is gradually taking the helm of the Huelgas Ensemble, in a process of succession that is still unfolding.
Created in Basel (Switzerland), in the vibrant atmosphere of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, the female vocal quartet Contre le Temps brings medieval music to life in a renewed form. Four singers—two French, two American—and four individual paths converging in a shared sound, always in search of itself.
A Franco-American harpsichordist born in Berkeley and based in Paris since adolescence, Lillian Gordis has established herself as a leading figure of her generation on the international stage. Acclaimed for the expressive power of her playing and her intellectual engagement, the “Martha Argerich of the harpsichord” is regularly invited to major festivals across Europe and the United States, while also pursuing a highly regarded recording career.
Between a twenty-date tour in France of L’Avare (“The Miser”), an intermezzo on Molière’s famous play composed in 1720 by the Italian Francesco Gasparini, and preparations for the next edition of the Misteria Paschalia festival in Kraków, for which he serves as musical director for the 2024–2026 period, spring promises to be busy for Vincent Dumestre and his ensemble Le Poème Harmonique.
In the landscape of European Baroque ensembles, Accademia Bizantina and its director, Ottavio Dantone, stand out for their originality and their sense of communication. “The Exciting Sound of Baroque Music” is their motto, and their concerts are guided by the watchword “Liberate the music”! As for the Brandenburg Concertos, they are recording them on their own label, HDB Sonus, in a series entitled Baroque Anatomy.
