Patronage

Dear audience, dear friends of music,

His Royal Highness Duke Franz of Bavaria and I cordially invite you to the 2023 Herrenchiemsee Festival.

Following the Festival’s joyful reopening last summer, when we were once more able to share and celebrate the special experience that is live music, we look forward to 2023 and welcoming you again to the idyllic natural setting of this most beautiful concert venue.

The composition of the Festival’s programme alludes to the ‘earth’s great clamour’, a phrase inspired by King Ludwig II. Within the programme itself two special premières are awaiting discovery alongside wonderful works by the great masters.

Our performances at Frauenchiemsee Minster include some of the newly transcribed masterpieces that are contained in the Chigi Codex. The focus is on the composer Johannes Ockeghem, whose compositions for the French royal court, together with the work of Munich court conductor Orlando di Lasso, pushed forward development from the High Renaissance to the Baroque and hence to the emergence and flowering of humanism.

The Chigi Codex, a music manuscript from Flanders, was probably commissioned by a private patron around the year 1500. According to musicologist Dr Herbert Kellman, it was created between 1498 and 1503. Currently held by the Vatican Library, its entire contents had been inaccessible to the public since the 16th century. Dr Edward Houghton has researched the manuscript and transcribed it into modern notation for the forthcoming publication of his long-awaited critical edition of the complete Chigi Codex, and our audience will hear extracts from this important new work for the first time. Publication of this impressive resource happens to coincide with the International Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference that is taking place in Bavaria this summer.

The second piece is a composition commissioned especially for the Herrenchiemsee Festival, ‘Ein ewig Rätsel will ich bleiben’ (‘I wish to remain an eternal enigma’), written by renowned French composer Jean-Pascal Beintus and performed by soloists of the KlangVerwaltung. As a playful overture to the final concert, the long-awaited reunion of society, music and nature is to be celebrated and is dedicated both to our loyal returning audience and to all first-time visitors to this unique Festival.

I do hope you will enjoy the Herrenchiemsee Festival 2023 with us!

Warm regards,
Kent Nagano