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The Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation supports the first Mozart Festival in Medellín in Colombia

 

The Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation will be lending its musical support to the first Mozart Festival in Medellín in Colombia. Organized by the Academia Filarmónica Iberoamericana de Medellín with the support of the Hilti Foundation, this Festival is taking place for the first time in Medellín between 25 August and 9 September 2018. Numerous concerts and a wide range of workshops, lectures and masterclasses are all intended to shed light on the music of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. The Foundation’s president, Johannes Honsig-Erlenburg, and its managing director, Tobias Debuch, will be  travelling to Colombia’s second-largest city with the Salzburg soprano Claire Elizabeth Craig and the Thai tenor Nutthaporn Thammathi, who is singing the title role in the 2019 Mozart Week production of T.H.A.M.O.S. The two singers will be appearing at the first concert on 1 September, a concert performance of Mozart’s singspiel Der Schauspieldirektor, as well as taking part in a masterclass and performing in the Requiem with their Latin American colleagues.

 

Johannes Honsig-Erlenburg is looking forward to expanding the scope of the Mozarteum Foundation’s activities to Latin America: “Medellín greets Mozart! What a feather in the cap of our partner, the Hilti Foundation! And what a pleasure and a challenge for the Salzburg Mozarteum to be part of this magnificent project, which aims to introduce Mozart’s works to a wider audience. It is a project which in its exemplary way helps to facilitate an exchange of musical ideas extending beyond regional and social boundaries.”

 

For Christine Rhomberg, the managing director of the Hilti Foundation, this Festival is a further important step in her Foundation’s work with the Mozarteum Foundation: “It’s a great privilege for the Hilti Foundation and above all for the Iberacademy in Medellín to be able to profit from the tremendous fund of knowledge, the experience and the fantastic network of the Mozarteum Foundation and to help to bring Mozart’s works closer to students and the general public in Colombia in the concentrated form of this Festival.”

 

Social Change Through Music: this is the aim of five highly ambitious projects that the Hilti Foundation has initiated in South America, all of them designed to last. Among them is the interregional initiative of the Academia Filarmónica Iberoamericana de Medellín (the Iberacademy) in Colombia. Some 120 young musicians are currently studying at university in Medellín, all of them supported by scholarships from the Iberacademy, which was founded in 2009 with the aim of enabling talented young men and women from socially disadvantaged backgrounds to gain entry to university and study music on the highest level. Their studies are complemented by the Iberacademy in the form of regular orchestral projects with the Iberacademy Orchestra featuring distinguished soloists and conductors who introduce these young musicians to the highest international standards.

 

The Hilti Foundation has been the Mozarteum Foundation’s partner in education since 2014. On the basis of this partnership, the Mozarteum Foundation has been working closely with the Medellín Academy since 2016. The Mozarteum Foundation has been able to draw on the invaluable experience that it gleaned during its highly successful project in Cuba. The aims of this cooperative venture are an exchange programme involving teachers and students, the transfer of know-how in the areas of cultural management and science and, above all, a deeper engagement with Mozart’s works in Colombia. Since 2016 two musicians from the Iberacademy have taken part in the Summer Academy of the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. The Iberacademy Orchestra also toured Europe last spring, giving acclaimed concerts in Winterthur, Lucerne, Vienna and in the Great Hall of the Mozarteum Foundation.