Program

Day program 2024

Rued Langgard Festival in Ribe, September 4-8

Program description

TRO - Rued Langgaard Festival 2024 September 4-8

In 2024, the Rued Langgaard Festival starts already on Wednesday September 4th Anton Bruckner was born 200 years ago on this very day. During his lifetime, Rued Langgaard was one of the first to work on getting Bruckner’s music performed in Denmark.

Although they lived in different periods, both Bruckner and Langgaard believe that music can bring us closer to a spiritual reality. This is particularly evident in Bruckner’s monumental symphonies, including Symphony No. 4, 7 and 8 are performed in different versions in Ribe Cathedral and the old monastery church Sct. Catharinæ.

The organ plays an important role in the festival, as Bruckner and Langgaard were both organists and were inspired by the great instrument. The same goes for Danish composer Benna Moe (1897-1983), who deserves a rediscovery. She composed in a late Romantic style and ranged from folk music to religious songs to colorful music played on the cinema organ.

Dora – Summer 1913 is the title of a new musical performance about Rued Langgaard’s great love Dora From, whose identity has only recently been revealed. Librettist Henrik Engelbrecht has written the text in collaboration with the Rued Langgaard Festival and created a performance that gives insight into how the love for Dora followed Langgaard throughout his life.

Through the elderly Dora looking back on her meetings with Rued, we gain a new understanding of Rued Langgaard’s simultaneously romantic and ecstatic music. The performance is for an actor, a soprano and a pianist and premieres at the Rued Langgaard Festival.

At Rued Langgaard Festival 2024, a two-year choir project will culminate when the Danish National Vocal Ensemble participates in the festival at two concerts, and when local choirs from Ribe, South and Southwest Jutland, the Young Vocal Ensemble and the festival audience gather at Domkirkepladsen for the opening concert Domkirkepladsen synger and perform Queen Dagmar ligger udi Ribe syg in a new arrangement inspired by Rued Langgaard’s musical imagination of the folk song.

The festival experience “a state of Langgaard” – with the interplay of music, talks, urban spaces and social events – will be further developed in 2024, with a special focus on the magical hours when day and night change.
With this year’s image Johan Thomas Lundbye’s The Rising Sun over the Sea (1838), which forms the background for the visual staging of the concerts, the focus is on a romantic visual artist who, with his sense of metaphysical sensations of nature, builds a bridge to the festival’s three theme composers.

And with the poetic walking concert Rued Langgaard’s Morning, which begins at sunrise and takes place in and around Ribe Art Museum and by the Ribe River, musicians from different genres come together in a new interpretation of Langgaard’s Symphony No. 14 The Morning.