Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival

“One hardly can experience such an individualistic folk of artists more easygoing and inwardly as outwardly more cheered up. Showing off is in Lockenhaus certainly proscribed.” one could read in Die Zeit in the year of foundation in 1981 about the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival.

Founded by Gidon Kremer and Msgr. Prof. Josef Herowitsch in 1981 the festival quickly developed to an internationally acclaimed oasis of chamber music. The impressive Knight’s Castle with its Knight’s Hall, said to had served as secret assembling place by the Templars, and the wonderful baroque church of Lockenhaus are offering magical performance spaces in the middle of the woods of Mittelburgenland: a place of refuge for discovery, experimentation, presentation of young or unknown artists, building artistic partnerships and live long friendships by music making on the highest standards.

The list of important artists who appeared in Lockenhaus in order to follow this aim is enormous and certainly impressive. A generation of composers as Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke or Arvo Pärt became widely known through their presentations by the Kammermusikfest Lockenhaus. György Kurtág presented his compositions, Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducted an orchestra consisting of acclaimed soloists, Boris Pergamenschikow, Heinz Holliger, András Schiff, Heinrich Schiff, Martha Argerich, Oleg Maisenberg, Robert Holl or Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau were as well part of the festival as the very young Hagen Quartett which made their first steps into their worldwide career to name just very few of the endless list of the Lockenhaus family.

The world has changed since those days, the festival was selected by the New York Times as European Cultural Heritage and renown German music critic Eleonore Büning writes in the FAZ “anyway, no one will believe this who has not been there”.

In 2011 Gidon Kremer passed on the Lockenhaus Kammermusikfest to French-German cellist Nicolas Altstaedt. Adding his profile and building his own musical family for the festival the founding spirit is living on under his artistic direction: year after year music lovers from all over the world go on a pilgrimage to this little picturesque village of Lockenhaus in Austria’s smallest county Burgenland in order to celebrate chamber music in unique intensity and nearness – in the center of Europe – remoted from the world.

“Nicolas Altstaedt, this amazingly charismatic Cellist, is in his fifth edition as artistic director after Gidon Kremer of an unconditionality, which almost could be frightened, if the results wouldn’t be that convincing….an up to the boiling point heated forge of sounds and ideas which one is allowed to approach as listener.”
Gerald Felber, FAZ 18.07.16