A hall, a chapel, a coffee house and a monastery church…

…all of them thoroughly typical venues for music in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries! – And we, the Institute for Early Music at the mdw, will be performing in six such venues in the heart of Vienna over three days in May.

Each venue opens up its own musical universe spanning the Baroque and Classical periods, and with the project ‘14 – Macrocosm within the Microcosm’, we’ll even be bridging the gap from Bach right into the 20th and 21st centuries.

On Friday, we will be performing at the Alte Konzertsaal, a monastic ballroom offering a magnificent view of the monastery gardens and the Belvedere. Our little festival opens with Italy’s powerful and virtuosic High Baroque music, which inspired and shaped the entire world of that era.

On Saturday, we’ll start by staying in Italy, but we’ll take a brief journey back in time to the era of Monteverdi, Uccellini and Kapsberger. And we’ll be stepping onto sacred ground, both literally and musically: look forward to the Bernardika Chapel, the Viennese city residence of Heiligenkreuz Abbey. In the afternoon, we’ll be drawn to the major cities of the 1800s: Paris, Copenhagen and Vienna are the creative hubs for instrumental sophistication. The day concludes with an experimental kaleidoscope of music for recorders, centred on Bach’s 14 canons and complemented by 20th-century compositions and brand-new works.

The third day begins – how could it be otherwise? – with a morning visit to the Café am Heumarkt! We are continuing the fine tradition of coffee-house concerts, with which Telemann and Bach once caused a sensation at Zimmermann’s Caffe-Hauß in Leipzig, and naturally the programme will feature music by these very two great composers. The programme concludes with a genuine ‘re-premiere’: Carlo Agostino Badia’s ‘Oratorio di Santa Teresa‘, which was first performed at the Ursuline Convent in Vienna as early as 1708, is set to be performed once again at St Ursula’s Church in 2024.

On behalf of all our students and teaching staff at the Institute, we warmly welcome you to all the concerts!

Eugène Michelangeli              Magdalena Hasibeder            Johannes Weiss

Institute Management Early Music