Future

Music begins with the voice: with breath that becomes sound, with a body that makes itself heard. We regard voices as what makes us unique. Speaking and singing feel to us like a fundamental human right.

Les voix humaines - the human voices - is the title of one of the most famous works by the French Baroque composer Marin Marais. Remarkably, he does not let those voices be heard in song, but in the strings of the viola da gamba. This paradox defines the festival theme: the human voice resounds, but never in just one way. It appears in ever-new forms, with the greatest diversity.

During Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht 2026, we let voices sound again. In doing so, we cherish a fondness for what is colourful and wondrous.

The repertoire for the voice is endless - from Gregorian monody to troubadour lyric poetry, and from the earliest sacred polyphony to secular forms such as opera, masque, and melodrama. We invite a contemporary composer to speak the language of the past. Singers perform as soloists or in large ensembles, even up to forty parts.

The theme of Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht 2027 is Humanists. This festival edition explores humanity's enduring attempt to become more human through art, and through music in particular.

Our point of departure is Christian Humanism, embodied by Erasmus of Rotterdam. We follow Erasmus on his travels through Europe, reconstructing the soundtrack of his life. From there, the focus shifts to the ideals of the Enlightenment as they take shape in the works of Rameau.

Human experience remains at the heart of the programme. One of its most distinctive expressions is the shedding of tears: tears of joy, befitting homo ludens, as well as tears of sorrow and compassion.

The festival also explores the expression of human passions in secular music and the religious sensibilities of Pietism. Romantic excess finds its place alongside confessions of love and desire, with the poetry of Petrarch occupying a place of honour. Human relationships are revealed in the bonds between teacher and pupil, patron and artist, while exchanges of letters provide one of their most intimate and nuanced expressions. In this way, the festival also acquires a distinctly literary dimension.

Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht 2027 thus explores what it means to be human, and how central the art of musical expression is to that experience.

The theme of our 2028 Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht will be London: a city that for centuries has been one of Europe’s most vibrant musical crossroads. Drawing musicians, composers, patrons and audiences from across the British Isles and the Continent, London developed a rich and diverse musical culture in which local traditions and international influences continuously interacted.

The festival will explore the city’s musical life in a broad context. Music by English composers and by the many foreign musicians who made London their home will be heard side by side. Royal, aristocratic and middle-class repertoire will all have their place, as will music written for the theatre, for churches and monastic institutions, and for domestic, ceremonial and social occasions. Through concerts, lectures and other festival activities, we will trace the networks, institutions and individuals that shaped London’s musical landscape, revealing a city whose history can be told through its sounds.

In ancient Greece and Rome, the status of free citizen was the central legal position in the community. Citizens enjoyed rights and took responsibility. The fact that there were also unfree people, alongside extreme wealth and dictators who placed themselves above others, clouds the picture. But the inspiring power of the citizen community remains intact. For more than 2500 years, the democratic ideal has been weighed and considered. At the same time, it has been threatened from all sides, even to this day.

In the Middle Ages, there were citizen communities in the rich Hanseatic cities, from Bruges to Hamburg. They dominated maritime trade in the North, while Italian city-states in Tuscany and Veneto controlled the South. This led to the emergence of banking and modern administration. With the successful uprising of the Swiss cantons against the Habsburg Empire, a citizen state was established for the first time in modern times. The struggle for freedom in the Netherlands, the English Glorious Revolution, and the French Revolution can be seen as the ultimately successful history of the self-confidence of the bourgeoisie, who settled accounts with the rule of aristocratic families and clans.

Much of the old music that has been handed down comes from aristocratic or religious circles. As a result, it is the music that resounded in cathedrals and palaces that is most often heard on our stages. This is anything but a representative reflection of the musical life of the past. With this festival, we let other sounds be heard: those of city pipers in the service of the civic administration, or of musicians who represented bourgeois society at official occasionsin the independent city-states in Italy, or of republics like the Netherlands. Citizens made music to confirm their status and to fulfill the civil virtues that legitimized society and held it together. Making music together is nothing less than an expression of civil equality.

This festival edition will have a strong Dutch accent, with a focus on the complex Golden Age. The repertoire of the Meistersänger, bourgeois poets and singers in the 15th and 16th centuries, will also come alive. We explore the bourgeois opera, from its origin in the Republic of Venice with Monteverdi and Cavalli to the Opera am Gänzemarkt in Hamburg with Keiser and Mattheson. We pay tribute to the forgotten greatness Telemann. The Abendmusiken of Tunder and later of Buxtehude in Hanseatic city Lübeck were an extraordinary phenomenon of bourgeois concerts in the religious space. The emergence of commercial bourgeois concert life in the 18th century also will enjoy our attention, think of the pleasure gardens and the oratorios of Handel in England, or the Concert Spirituel in Paris.