Handel Festival 2025

From 05 June 2025 to 14 June 2025/ Germany / Halle (Saale)

 

Fresh Wind: The Young Handel in Italy

 
The Halle Handel Festival, 6-15 June 2025
 
 The festival title focuses on the four years that Handel spent in Italy. He left Hamburg probably in the summer or autumn of 1706. He spent a lot of time in Rome (from February until the autumn of 1707 and from July 1708 to the autumn of 1709, but we know even that only approximately), where he made the acquaintance, among others, of Corelli, Lotti and the two Scarlattis. This was the school of Italian music, which the young composer set out to study. For this reason, the Handel Festival is to present the seldom-heard oratorio La Santissima Annunziata by Alessandro Scarlatti in a fervent interpretation by Fabio Biondi and his ensemble Europa Galante. Scarlatti wrote the work in 1700 or 1703 to a libretto by Cardinal Ottoboni, who also commissioned works from Handel. Handel’s sacred oratorio La resurrezione was premiered under the direction of Corelli on Easter Sunday, 1708) in the palace of the Marchese Ruspoli in Rome and bears testimony to how far the 23-year-old composer had matured in Italy.
 
With 66 main and secondary events in 17 venues in and around Halle, you can hear international stars of Baroque music such as Julia Lezhneva, Max Emanuel Cencic, Anna Bonitatibus, Mahan Esfahani, Rey Chenez, Bruno de Sa and Christoph Prégardien alongside Reinhard Goebel, Fabio Biondi, Martyna Pastuszka, Attilio Cremonesi, Federico Maria Sardelli, Hervé Niquet, Wolfgang Katschner, Lautten Compagney Berlin, the Italian ensembles Modo Antiquo and Europa galante, the Polish {Oh! Orkiestra} and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, as well as the Danish Concerto Copenhagen and Le Concert Spirituel from Paris. 
The City of Halle Handel Prize, awarded by the Handel House Foundation, goes this year to the Handel Festival Orchestra Halle. With it, the Handel House Foundation Board of Trustees honours the decades of dedicated interpretation of Handel’s music on period instruments by this specialist ensemble of Staatskapelle Halle. 
The 2025 International Academic Conference is entitled “Handel’s Italian Texts and his Librettists”. It takes a closer look at the Italian texts that Handel set to music and his contacts with Italian literature and librettists, and attempts comparisons with other 18th-century composers. 
Of particular importance to the Handel Festival is its accessibility to the people of the city and region. Some events are admission-free, while the two concerts in the Galgenberg Gorge will conclude the festival with popular programmes and guest artists such as Kissin‘ Dynamite and the British conductor Joolz Gale. Hip-hopper Raphael Moussa Hillebrand and the young composer Oscar Jockel are concocting a programme together with young people from Halle-Neustadt. 

 
Handel Festival 2025

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