Newsletter July 24

Festival Opening in a New Venue

In addition to presenting beautiful Baroque music in the heart of Copenhagen, another goal of the Copenhagen Baroque Festival is to raise awareness of architecture and the Baroque spaces of the inner city – and to perform music in surroundings that make it sound even more historical and authentic if possible. We hope that the music will give life and resonance to the buildings and vice versa – that inspiration goes both ways – and that the city’s historic buildings, with the sounding music, take on new meaning for us when we occasionally pass by them in our busy daily lives.

Thus, we are very proud to welcome concerts in some of the inner city’s most iconic buildings for the 6th year – Rosenborg Castle, the Round Tower, and Trinitatis Church – while we are incredibly pleased with a new collaboration that has emerged this year – namely the collaboration with the beautiful Baroque church Our Saviour’s Church in Christianshavn, where we will hold the festival’s opening concerts on Wednesday, September 4th at 7:30 PM and 9:30 PM.

The concert at 7:30 PM honors the patron saint of music, Saint Cecilia, and will take the listener on a musical journey with Orpheus in devoted gratitude and grand tribute to music. We offer an overwhelmingly beautiful concert as the soft perfectly controlled voice of French baritone Marc Mauillon and the sublimely sounding Baroque orchestra Arte dei Suonatori unfold under the musical direction of the exceptionally musical Marcin Świątkiewitz.

After the concert, we invite you to a glass of bubbly, where we can enjoy each other’s and the musicians’ company and celebrate the beginning of the festival. For those who wish to stay longer, there is the next concert at 9:30 PM with Denmark’s sublime pianist Carsten Dahl, who with his magical hands improvises at the piano and creates an intimate and enchanting end to the evening.

Our Saviour’s Church is another of the city’s most famous and cherished landmarks, but when is it actually from…? The church was built during the reign of King Christian V in the 1680s and inaugurated on April 19, 1696. The Order of the Elephant was made the most significant of the Danish orders during Christian V, making the elephant decorations also a significant part of the church’s interior – both in the stucco and on the organ’s impressive front.

We look forward to welcoming you to the festival’s opening and hope you will enjoy both King Christian V’s many monograms, the elephants on the historic original organ front from 1696-1698, the spiraling spire, and the stars in the celestial vault.

Ellen Hillingsø

We are incredibly pleased to start a collaboration this year with actress Ellen Hillingsø, who will guest several of the festival’s concerts with readings, thereby connecting tones and words in musical stories – “Musical Stories.” Ellen Hillingsø has a voice like summer-warm butter and, with her dramatic involvement, can unfold texts in interplay with the music. Experience Ellen Hillingsø together with Poul and Silene Høxbro in the concert ‘Travelling Tales,’ where she will read some of Heiberg’s travel descriptions, or at the concert ‘Secrets of the Castle’ at Rosenborg Castle with excerpts from the French medieval tale ‘The Romance of the Rose.’

We know that the music, the spaces, and the words can do something special; they can set the imagination in motion, bring history to life, and take us on entirely new adventures. So come and join us in celebrating Copenhagen and its rich musical and architectural heritage!