Attend a handpicked selection of performances at the 2024 Dresden Music Festival, featuring musicians including the award-winning pianists Igor Levit and Seong-Jin Cho
Attend five concerts in a selection of Dresden venues, including two at the recently-opened Kulturpalast concert hall
Venture outside the city to learn about the lives of three leading German composers: Wagner, Weber and Johann Sebastian Bach
"Sandy wore his learning lightly and made the lectures fun as well as informative."
- ACE customer on a previous music tour with Sandy Burnett
On Tour Director Sandy Burnett’s first visit to Dresden 33 years ago, the Iron Curtain had only recently come down, and the city’s iconic Frauenkirche, destroyed by the Allied bombing raids of 1945, occupied a central place in the city as a poignant reminder of war – as a pile of rubble in the centre of the city.
Time has transformed this magnificent city of the former East Germany; the Frauenkirche has been painstakingly reconstructed, and the charming but old-fashioned Trabants and Wartburgs have disappeared from the city’s streets. Dresden is a city that is looking ahead, and its Music Festival, established in the Cold War years, is thriving under the leadership of world-renowned cellist Jan Vogler.
ACE is delighted to present a tour to this notable music festival. Our itinerary features two contrasting piano programmes by Igor Levit and Seong-Jin Cho, and two quite different song recitals too: one of the world’s leading baritones Matthias Goerne gives an all-Schumann programme, and we also look forward to a concert by Jane Monheit, US jazz singer and doyenne of the Great American Songbook. A concert of Sibelius and Dvořák from conductor Manfred Honeck and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic rounds off the festival selection.
We will enjoy complementary visits in and around Dresden, and also hope to feature a private tour of the Semper Opera House and an excursion to Graupa to visit the Lohengrin House and Jagdschloss.
We will stay throughout at the Hyperion Hotel Dresden am Schloss, conveniently located in the heart of Dresden’s Old Town.
This tour will be led by Sandy Burnett, a musician and broadcaster who spent over a decade as one of the best-known classical music presenters on BBC Radio 3. A graduate of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, Sandy has conducted many orchestras and choirs; presented live broadcasts from the Proms and Edinburgh Festival; and masterminded a complete cycle of JS Bach’s sacred cantatas. He also spent many years as a musical director in London’s West End, and jazz and improvised music form another important part of his output. As a double bassist he collaborated with many leading musicians across the world. Sandy has also been appointed the Hogwood Fellow of the Academy of Ancient Music.
Tour Director Sandy Burnett writes:
‘It is a great pleasure to return with ACE to one of my favourite German cities, and one with a fascinating history. Dresden now boasts a new concert hall, the Kulturpalast, which made an appearance in the recent feature film Tár, and it will be the venue for our opening and closing concerts. I am really looking forward to talking about the music on our programme, most of it firmly rooted in the context of German Romanticism. And it will be a pleasure to bring my insights into another great musical art form, that of jazz, as I set the scene for jazz singer Jane Monheit’s recital drawing on the Great American Songbook.’
6
£3495
DRMF-24
Included: return airfare, accommodation based on sharing a twin or double bedded room, performances as described, five breakfasts, two lunches, four dinners with water & coffee, excursions & admissions, gratuities & all taxes.
Not Included: travel insurance, double room for single use supplement £345.
