Dreams focus of this year’s Summer Festivities of Early Music
The annual Summer Festivities of Early Music kick off in Prague on Tuesday evening with a special concert at Prague’s Emmaus Monastery. The performance, featuring rare instruments and music from medieval manuscripts, will bring to life an altarpiece by the famous Flemish Renaissance painter Hans Memling. I discussed the opening event and more with the festival’s director Josefína Matyášová:
“The story behind this project started in 2017, when the Flemish ensemble Oltremontano Antwerpen became the ensemble in residence at the Art Museum in Antwerp. This enabled its artistic director Wim Becu to be inspired by Memling’s triptych, which is called God the Father with Singing and Music-Making Angels.
“The painter’s precision inspired Becu to reconstruct all the instruments which are portrayed in the picture and make their exact copies. However the central instrument of the painting remains the human voice. So the concert will be a showcase of very interesting sounds coming from mediaeval times.”
The unifying theme of this year’s edition of Summer Festivities of Early Music are dreams. Why have you chosen this topic?
“It is a very broad topic and we understand it in a very broad sense.
If you hear beautiful music in your dreams, it is a lucky sign, and so we decided to focus our programme on dreams and dreaming, but also on imagination, fantasies, visions and also a kind of magic in various early music contexts. We will also focus on the work of important musical visionaries.
“I would like also to point out that with parts of our program, we want to fulfil our audiences’ but also the festival team’s dreams. That's why we invited ensembles which belong among our most favourite ones.”
Can you mention at least some of them?
We will host, for example, the Italian ensemble Talenti Vulcanici, then our very favourite Spanish Euskal Barrok Ensemble with versatile musician and Baroque guitar player Enrike Solinís. We will also have the Portuguese ensemble Os Músicos do Tejo and the rising star of world opera, soprano singer Ana Vieira Leite.
“In the Portuguese programme, we will hear opera music from Portuguese music archives but also the melancholic modinhas, lundums and fado, very typical styles and musical forms coming from Portugal.”
I also wanted to ask you about the closing concert which is a rather unusual combination of opera and puppets. Can you tell us more?
“Yes. We will end our celebration of the festival’s birthday anniversary in a theatre. The staged performance of Handel's pastoral opera Acis and Galatea is a kind of portrait of life in love and peace which even jealousy cannot destroy and in which death is not a sign of the end, but rather a new beginning.”
“I think that in the European context the connection of opera and puppets is not rare at all. We can find a number of projects based on this combination and it works very well. However, in Czechia, it is not so usual.
“This performance with Baroque gestures and puppets of various sizes is the result of many years of cooperation between the Collegium Marianum, the ensemble in residence of Summer Festivities of Early Music, and the Buchty and Loutky theatre troupe.”
You are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the festival’s founding this year. How has the festival changed or developed over the past quarter of a century?
“I think that 25 years ago, nobody even dreamed of having 25 volumes. But now we can see that Summer Festivities have matured and have a clear vision, stable audiences and a stress on quality.
“I would like also to say that the spirit and the soul of our festival is the audience. We are doing it for our listeners and I truly hope that music will keep connecting us in the future. I also hope that the whole festival goes like a dream.”
