Beethoven Festival 2004: Beethoven and Bohemia & Moravia

Deutsche Welle is the official media partner and main sponsor – The Beethoven festival and Deutsche Welle “Orchestercampus”, a music workshop together with a university orchestra from China.

World wide publicity with radio campaigns and ‘quiz’ special productions being made for 400 partner stations.

From 2004, the Beethoven festival will be taking a trip into the various cultural regions around Europe. This year we will be having a look at Bohemia and Moravia, with more than 50 concerts from 17 September to 10 October looking at Ludwig van Beethoven’s connections with this part of Europe as its theme. The focus of the festival is not only interesting because of the accession of the Czech republic into the EU this year, but there are a few anniversaries to celebrate as well. It’s the 150th anniversary of the birth of Czech composer Leos Janácek as well as the 100th anniversary of the death of Antonin Dvorák. The Czech philhormonia conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner will be giving interpretations of some of the more prominent composers from Bohemia & Moravia.

This year the Beethoven Festival will again be a meeting point for young musicians from all over the world. The orchestra of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing will be travelling to the Beethoven festival this year and making appearances at Deutsche Welle and the orchestra campus. They will be following in the footsteps of university orchestras from Kiev, Istanbul and Tiblisi, which were invited to Bonn in previous years at the suggestion of Deutsche Welle. About eighty Chinese students will be giving a concert in the “Beethoven Halle”. Their music program contains works by Beethoven and Liszt as well as the first performance of a work of Peking music lecturer, Wen Chen Quin, which was commissioned as a work by Deutsche Welle.

The soloist for Piano concerto no. 1 by Franz Liszt is the young Chinese pianist Yun Di Li, who has won incredible fame in his homeland and since winning first prize at the Warsaw Chopin competition, now can claim to be one of the world’s most sought after musicians. The concert will be broadcast worldwide by Deutsche Welle as well as in China by DW partner radio stations, reaching a huge international audience.

Finally the Orchestra campus will be offering the Chinese musicians the opportunity to get to know Beethoven interpretations from the heart of Europe in a workshop under the direction of experienced conductor Peter Gülke. This German-Chinese cooperation project is under the patronage of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

The planned performance by these students has already won them great acclaim and interest in their own country. For example, in the Chinese province of Henan the local radio station held a Beethoven-competition for young pianists in co-operation with Deutsche Welle, of which the three best will be able to visit the Beethoven festival in Bonn. One of the prize winners will also take part in the “Night of the Pianos” performance, which is also part of the festival.

As media partner and one of the three main sponsors, Deutsche Welle will be making the 2004 Beethoven festival an international event through broadcasts on DW radio, on DW TV and online at dw-world.de.
More than 5000 minutes of programming time have been allotted to the festival on DW Rdaio and DW TV in broadcasts in many different languages, throughout the duration of the festival. From April 21 DW radio and TV will begin a festival advertising campaign worldwide. There will also be a “Beethoven quiz” promoting the festival.

DW Radio will produce special reports for some 400 partner stations worldwide with detailed information about concerts being held at the international festival. These will be offered in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.