FestiVita! 2023 at the Cercle Royal Gaulois in Brussels

FestiVita! 2023

The history of the project FestiVita

En 2019, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, the association set up FestVita!, a festival bringing together 150 artists in 23 concerts in various places in Brussels in front of an audience of 2500 people. With its success, this event then gave birth to FestiVita! Brussels Early Music Festival, a new initiative devoted to early music. The Zero Edition” organized on March 5, 2021 in the midst of a health crisis consisted of an online concert. In 2022, with the return of a delighted public, the program has been extended with 9 concerts, a renaissance ball, a round table, thus as entertainment and even an exhibition.

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Where does FestiVita take place?

It is at the Royal Gaulish Artistic and Literary Circle, that FestiVita will welcome you warmly. The place is suitable for early music. The large room has a capacity of 300 to 350 quite comfortable seating. You will not be disappointed, acoustics there is excellent. In terms of visibility, you will also be delighted: the stage will be elevated so as to ensure good visibility from each seat. Also, additional lighting will be adapted to each concert.

Discover the richness and magic of early music

February 16 to 19, 2023, the Cercle Royal Gaulois in Brussels will host the second edition of the FestiVita! Brussels Early Music Festival. Four days to discover the magic and the wealth of ancient music in sixteen shows, intended for the uninitiated as well as for experienced music lovers and offering, for the most part, exclusive programs. A clever and delicious blend of musicological research and openness to today's performers, the festival has chosen the “Grand European tour” as the guiding thread for this edition. It innovates this year by inviting five young ensembles to present the results of their research during short performances on the “Première” podium.

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“FestiVita! addresses a repertoire ranging from the end of the Middle Ages to the postclassical period by sharing this typical approach of early music, which consists of getting closer to the musical practices of the time", explains flautist Michel Keustermans, organizer of the festival. “We play on period instruments, we respect the rhetoric, the tempo, the gestures of the time. It's a very different experience from a contemporary performance on modern instruments. It is above all an approach of openness” So we can hear resonating at the Cercle Gaulois works by Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven interpreted on the pianoforte – and by candlelight! – by Petra Somlai (17.02, 22:45 p.m.).

Discover the programming of the FestiVita

For this second edition, the program is articulated around the theme of the "Grand European tour", this educational journey practiced by Baroque composers and described by the English composer Charles Burney (1726-1814), one of the fathers of modern musicology. The public will be able to immerse themselves in this era during the “Banquet-we-serve”, a gastronomic concert with a menu borrowed from the Italian 19.02th century and whose five courses will alternate with period musical interludes (12, 00:XNUMX). Another novelty: FestiVita! invites young ensembles to present the results of their research in early music. Among the ensembles that responded to the call for projects, five will perform on the podium “first” in the format of a commented mini-concert (18.02, 14 p.m.).

True to the vocation of the festival, the opening concert Mon Amant de Saint-Jean by the ensemble The Harmonic Poem is aimed at all audiences. With the French soprano Isabelle Druet, 2nd prize at the 2008 Queen Elisabeth Competition, he breathes into the music of Monteverdi and his contemporaries the sweet madness of songs from the Roaring Twenties (16.02, 20 p.m.). Connoisseurs will savor and the uninitiated will gladly discover the concert as a world premiere. Screams from the whole In Alto and the soprano Alice Foccroule, under the direction of the cornetist Lambert Colson, which retraces the tradition launched by Clément Janequin of setting music to the din heard in medieval markets. World premiere, the whole The Muffattis accompanies the mezzo Coline Dutilleul and the countertenor Clint Van der Linde, in a lesser known work by Antonio Vivaldi: The Gloria and Imeneo. This sumptuous serenade, composed for the wedding of Louis XV in the gardens of the French Embassy in Venice, exemplifies the important diplomatic role that music could play (17.02 20:45).