The Next Generation Festival in the Swiss resort Bad Ragaz is busy promoting young musicians also between its February festivals. From 13 to 15 October 2016 a three-day festival titled MusicConnects is now being organised to bring young artists to Bad Ragaz and the hotel Grand Resort once again.
Apart from the young members of the string orchestra Ensemble Esperanza, who have frequently performed at the Next Generation Festival and shown the successful co-operation of musicians who were originally trained to be solo performers, the festival MusicConnects will focus on three soloists as well. Inspired by making music together and under the expert tuition of the experienced violinist Chouchane Siranossian (the concert master of the chamber orchestra) the young musicians of the Ensemble Esperanza have really achieved a lot.
The festival MusicConnects will feature three musicians who once were the Festival Next Generation’s artists in residence.
The Russian violinist Yuri Revich (ICMA Young Artist of the Year 2015), the Romanian cellist Andrei Ionita and the Croatian guitarist Petrit Ceku are world-class soloists who are pursuing promising careers and are giving concerts all over the world. Nevertheless, they have never given up chamber music – the focus of the Festival Next Generation –.
The name MusicConnects is direction-setting in more than one way: the musicians are connected by the music and their collaborative work when rehearsing and performing their programme. The hotel Grand Resort Bad Ragaz, on the other hand, promotes the close contact between the artists and the audience: the musicians live and work in the hotel and the guests – who do not only attend the concerts – meet the artists face-to-face and experience them in person. This intimate atmosphere is the distinctive feature of any musical activities that take place at the hotel Grand Resort Bad Ragaz.
The programmes of the Festival Next Generation and of MusicConnects are planned by the artistic director Drazen Domjanic in close co-operation with the musicians. Yuri Revich, Andrei Ionita and the pianist Mario Häring will present the greatest works for their instruments in single concerts that cover the musical range from the Baroque period to modern music. The opening concert, however, will focus on the virtuoso and the Ensemble Esperanza: works by Luigi Boccherini, Antonio Vivaldi and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy will be performed together with the three soloists. The final concert, which combines music with a formal dinner of exquisite dishes, will carry the audience away into the musical world of the north – to Edvard Grieg, Carl Nielsen and Gustav Holst.
