1st edition: Once Upon… Infinity.
Yet another festival? All over the territory of little Denmark small and big festivals take over from each other constantly almost all year round, the peak of course being during the summer months. Whether you like heavy metal, knitting, apples or classical chamber music you can find the right festival, and what’s not to like about that? According to us that is some of the most beautiful about the Danish entrepreneur and community mentality.
So we thought that we should contribute a bit, not only by playing at different chamber music festivals every year, but also by organising a music festival on our own. If the story, the timing and the concept is special enough there is definitely space for one more festival.
It took off at some point half way through 2021 where we were talking about the upcoming anniversary of Carl Nielsen’s prominent Wind Quintet opus 43. We did some research and decided that we would like to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first public performance of the piece on the 9th of October 2022, since it is such a special and important piece of music, of course especially regarded so here in Denmark, but internationally it is highly acclaimed too, and we thought that the communication of the stories behind the creation of the piece and the stories of the time around it could get much reverb here in 2022.
We discovered that Paul Hindemith’s and Arnold Schönberg’s wind quintets shared a story with Nielsen’s, and from then we were thinking of making a celebration on a festival scale. But what we actually dreamt of from deep inside was to organise a chamber music festival that could return every year on the same dates, and even though we are wind players we are much more inspired by other musicians than our own race, so this festival of course shouldn’t be a nerdy wind instrument’s gathering, rather an intelligently pitched celebration of high quality chamber music.
We like to tell stories with our playing. That’s all what music making is about, and thus we chose the general title Once Upon… for our festival. This year we are gonna tell stories about infinity, and the next years the stories will be about other things.
