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Flander's Festival Antwerp: Laus Polyphoniae Antwerp - Belgium Last week of August
The Flander's Festival-Antwerp presents during its summer festival Laus Polyphoniae annually a unique programme of concerts and educational activities in the concert's fringe, highly esteemed in Belgium and abroad. Laus Polyphoniae is one of the only, if not the only, festival focusing on the rich repertoire of the Flemish polyphonic masters of the renaissance and their contempories. Their influence on musical life on the complete European continent in the 15th and 16th cannot be underestimated. These Franco-Flemish composers held important posts at the courts and religious centres of Europe.
Every year the festival, during the last week of August, presents lunch and evening concerts, nocturne concerts, musical workshops for adults and children, as well as the annual competition for young ensembles, the Internation Young Artist's Presentation (IYAP).
Former festival themes included 'Jacob Obrecht and his time', 'Musica Britannica', 'Conquista y Reconquista - music for the New World', 'Josquin Desprez and his contempories', 'Polifonia Italiana'. The 2007 edition will present 'La polyphonie française'.
NEXT PERIOD PROGRAM
French polyphonic music from the Middle Ages untill 1600
The French musical history of the Middle Ages and renaissance reads like a virtually continuous chain of unique and crucial moments. With those moments, French musicians, composers or patrons managed to greatly influence and steer the history of Western European music. After previous editions dedicated to the (French) Flemish polyphony of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, Laus Polyphoniae 2007 focuses its gaze on the exceptionally wide spectrum of the earliest traces of French music until the period up to the year 1600.
A first section that appeals to our imagination is dedicated to the various periods where France dominated the European musical scene before the rise of Flemish polyphony around 1400. This section includes the first major bloom of music for numerous voices, with twelfth-century Aquitaine polyphony in the abbey of Saint-Martial in Limoges (Discantus), the unsurpassed thirteenth-century Ars Antiqua of the Parisian Notre-Dame school (Discantus, Il Nostro Domo del Sogno), the radically innovative fourteenth-century Ars Nova art by Guillaume de Machaut and his contemporaries active in Paris and Avignon (Diabolus in musica, Musica Nova, Ensemble Organum), including the subsequent followers in the so-called Ars subtilior (Tetraktys).
A second major section focuses on sixteenth-century French music. Ensemble Clément Janequin, this year’s ensemble ‘in residence’, takes the lead. Central is the blooming and extremely varied chanson art, which underwent a surprising high point with figures such as Claudin de Sermisy, Claude Lejeune, Clément Janequin, Pierre Certon and Pierre Sandrin. The zealous music publishers in Paris and Lyon, among other locations, played a major role in disseminating this music. At the same time, the works are featured of the Flemish and French polyphonic musicians (Prioris, Brumel), who played a determining role at the French court at the time of Louis XII, François I and Louis XIII (Huelgas Ensemble, Capilla flamenca, Ensemble Faenza, Egidius Kwartet).
Laus Polyphoniae 2007 will not only be a very high-quality, but also a very diverse festival. Apart from concerts, this year, the Festival van Vlaanderen-Antwerpen will be organising a number of fringe activities as well: master classes, an in-depth interview with the ensemble in residence, three accompanying lectures, concert introductions, round table discussions and the sixth edition of the International Young Artist’s Presentation, an international musical contest for new talent.
SPONSORS
Flemish gouvernment, City of Antwerp, Province of Antwerp
