Malmö Chamber Music festival to launch 2016

Nordic music programming, producing and arranging body Musik i Syd – based in the Øresund region straddling Malmö and Copenhagen – is launching Malmö Chamber Music (MCM), a new international chamber music festival starting 2016.

MCM will hold its first edition from September 21-25 next year, and return annually thereafter, with internationally renowned trumpet soloist Håkan Hardenberger named as its first artistic director. Hardenberger is now tasked with using his artistic expertise and worldwide network of contacts to ensure MCM festival claims a leading position in the Nordic countries in terms of artistic content and quality.

Initial plans for the MCM festival suggest it will incorporate a large number of chamber music concerts across several venues in the city – including the festival’s home base, the new Palladium Malmö – and boasting a roster of internationally renowned guest artists from home and abroad.

Hardenberger said: ‘In Malmö we have a chamber music hall of the highest international class – aesthetic beauty and exceptional acoustics inspire the intimate. Palladium is our heart, our inner chamber. We tend the flames of tradition with the Salomon Smith Chamber Music Society and the opulence of St Petri cathedral. And, to shake things up, we have Klubb Krinolin blazing trails in trendy Möllevången, proving that Malmö is our ‘Little Berlin’.

Håkan Hardenberger © Marco Borggreve
Håkan Hardenberger © Marco Borggreve

‘Now it is my great honour, with deepest gratitude to Musik i Syd, to help fill these generous chambers. Friends and colleagues from all over the world are invited to perform the classical canon alongside unique rarities and music so fresh the ink is not yet dry.’

Hardenberger has a clear motive for wanting to deliver a new world-class event in the area: although his annual performance commitments take him all around the globe, he has always maintained a home base in the region of Skåne, and the city of Malmö in particular.

Martin Martinsson, Managing Director of Musik i Syd, commented on the trumpet maestro’s appointment, saying: ‘I am very happy that we have managed to involve Håkan Hardenberger in the festival. He has already shown that he has very ambitious and definite plans regarding Malmö Chamber Music. He will provide the festival with powerful artistic content and expression. Each concert will be well thought through in all its parts and will have its own individual dramaturgy.

‘It is also great that he has highlighted a number of scenes and locations in Malmö and has already thought about possible partners. It is gratifying that he is very positive about Musik i Syd’s own venue, Palladium. We have every reason to look forward with excitement to some intense days of chamber music packed with wonderful experiences in September 2016. Malmö Chamber Music constitutes a new and exciting challenge for Musik i Syd.’

Of his particular passion for chamber recital, Hardenberger added: ‘The chamber [is] the innermost space of the heart – the source of life, of our deepest emotions… and of music. In an intimate space, long before the symphony and far from today’s massive loudspeakers and arenas, the composer is challenged to use the most delicate of instruments. Every tiny interaction of the musicians – a glance, a heartbeat – fills the space, and every sigh or smile from the audience pulsates back to the musicians.’

malmochambermusic.se