Early music festival in Brežice will host six concerts

Brežice/Ljubljana – The internationally renowned festival of early music, Seviqc Brežice 2021, will span over four venues in Brežice, Dolenjske Toplice, Slovenska Bistrica, and Šmartno pri Litiji. It will feature a total of six concerts, kicking off at Brežice Castle on Saturday and coming to a close at the same venue on 23 August.

According to the Seviqc 2021 programme, Spanish groups Amystis and Ministriles de la Reyna will open the festival at Brežice Castle with a concert of music from the period of Tomas Luis de Victoria, also known as the Golden Age of Spain, performing works by unknown Spanish polyphonists.

The next day, the programme will continue at the Devil’s Tower in Soteska, a village in the municipality of Dolenjske Toplice, with a concert by Italian musician Fabio Antonio Falcone on an instrument called clavicytherium. He will perform Renaissance music from the oldest published collection for keyboard instruments.

The third concert will take place on 9 August at Bogenšperk Castle in Šmartno pri Litiji, where the Dutch group Butter Quartet will perform music by Viennese classical masters Vanhal, Haydn and Mozart.

The festival will then continue on 13 August at Brežice Castle with a performance of Spanish violinist Adriana Alcaida, with the programme consisting of improvisations and “still lifes” by Bach, Matteis and von Biber.

The penultimate evening of the festival will take place on 16 August at the Bistrica Castle in Slovenska Bistrica, where the Dutch trio Scaramuccia will perform “music that has survived bombings, fires and floods” – the newly discovered violin and continuo sonatas by Johann Georg Pisendel.

The final evening of the festival will be hosted by Brežice Castle on 23 August, as the French four-piece ensemble Le Baroque Nomade will perform French Baroque music.

According to the Seviqc festival’s website, audiences will be invited to a talk with the performers an hour and a half before each concert. They added that the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts will be the festival’s honorary patron.

The Seviqc Early Music Festival was founded in 1982. In 1997, it was moved from Radovljica to Brežice, then it was extended to neighbouring municipalities, and later spread across the country. The name Seviqc is a contraction of the Latin “semper vita quam creata”, which translates roughly as “always live as created”.

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