The 6th Carl Loewe Festival 2016 was dedicated to the 220th birthday of Carl Loewe (1796-1869) and was once again held jointly by the city of Wettin-Löbejün and the International Carl Loewe Society. The three days of the event offered a varied program that took visitors on a very special musical journey of discovery through the life and entire compositional work of Carl Loewe.
This began on Friday morning with the school project “Der Nöck”, in which students from the Carl Loewe primary school and the “Carl Loewe” district music school designed a program about the life of Carl Loewe based on the children’s book “Loewe Carls Löbejüner Favoritennöck” by Jürgen Jankofsky .
A newly designed city tour with music, special tours in the Carl Loewe Museum, an author reading (travel literature about Saxony-Anhalt and especially about Wettin-Löbejün), the festive service on Sunday morning in the Löbejün town church with organ music, and the subsequent musical-literary matinee the Rhenish cabaret artist Konrad Beikircher and the final concert by the district music school “Carl Loewe” - the selection was large!
The opening concert on Friday evening (April 22, 2016) included the overture to MALEKADHEL (a great tragic opera by Carl Loewe from 1832) and the overture and choruses to Ernst Raupach's tragedy in 5 acts "Themisto" for the first time since its premiere in Stettin in 1833. can be heard again in the setting by Carl Loewe. Famous orchestrations of Loewe ballads and songs, for example by Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951); Hans Pfitzner (1869-1949); Leo Blech (1871-1958); Felix Mottl (1856-1911), Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970); Michael Dobrzynski (Szczecin), thrilled the guests. The performers were the Wernigerode Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra and the Halle Madrigalists (a capella with rare choral works by Carl Loewe) as well as Susanna Pütters (soprano) and Henryk Böhm (baritone).
The concert was broadcast live by Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk!
The concert evening on Saturday (April 23, 2016) was under the motto “Loewe and Schumann – two great romantics”. Loewe ballads and Schumann songs were heard, the rarely performed Grand Trio (op. 12 for piano, violin and cello) by Loewe, Schumann's Fantasy Pieces (op. 76 for clarinet/piano) and the Scottish Pictures (op. 112 for Piano/clarinet) by Carl Loewe.
The musicians Cord Garben (piano/Hamburg), Christian Seibold (clarinet/Hamburg), Peter Schöne (baritone/Munich), Holger Berndsen (piano/Nuremberg), Marietta Kratz (violin/Hamburg), Sebastian Gaede (cello/Hamburg) and Henning Lucius (piano/Rostock) was enthusiastically celebrated by the audience.
The patron of the 6th Carl Loewe Festival, the Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt Dr. Reiner Haseloff stated: “The Carl Loewe festival has long since become established. They have an excellent reputation far beyond Saxony-Anhalt as a renowned music festival with very high artistic standards. In Löbejün you get particularly close to Carl Loewe these days.”
