Handel Festival, Halle
| Handel Festival | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Music mostly by G. F. Handel |
| Frequency | annual |
| Location(s) | Halle an der Saale, many locations |
| Inaugurated | 1922 |
| Website | |
| http://www.haendelfestspiele.halle.de/en/festspiele/ | |
The Handel Festival (in German: Händel-Festspiele) in Halle an der Saale, Saxony-Anhalt, is an international music festival concentrating on the music of George Frideric Handel in the composer's birthplace. It was founded in 1922 and it grew into a center of Handel studies and performance in Europe. Especially Handel's operas have been staged regularly, some of them as first revivals.
The first Handel Festival in Halle was conducted in 1922, three years after the Handel Festival in Göttingen. It showed the oratorios Semele and Susanna, the opera Orlando furioso arranged by Hans Joachim Moser, and smaller works by Handel and other Halle composers of the 16th, 17th and 18th century. A Händel-Gesellschaft (Handel Society) was founded in 1925 and staged a second festival in 1929, directed by Hermann Abert. The 250th anniversary of the composer in 1935 was the occasion for a third festival, termed "Reichs-Händelgedenktage" by the Nazis. After World War II Erich Neuß, Max Schneider, Herbert Koch and others founded a Hallische Händel-Gesellschaft (Halle Handel Society), which organized a fourth festival in 1948 in collaboration with the Landestheater, the Evangelische Kirchenmusikschule (Academy of Protestant Church Music) and the Musikhochschule. It took place in the , completed shortly before.
Since 1952 the festival has been organized annually by the city of Halle, in collaboration with scholars of the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe. The Handel Music Prize has been awarded as part of the festival first in 1956, since 1993 annually.
The Opernhaus Halle has contributed at least one of Handel's operas each time, in addition a regular guest performance has been staged at the in Bad Lauchstädt, the only extant theater from the poet's time. The festival's orchestra is since 1993 the Händel-Festspielorchester, playing period instruments, conducted by Howard Arman until 2007, when Bernhard Forck took over. An additional feature of the festival is the performance of works of composers from Sachsen-Anhalt who were close to Handel.
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Wikipedia