Dear Ladies and Gentlemen
Dear festival visitors, dear music and recorder lovers

It is a great pleasure for me to invite you to our wonderful festival all about the recorder and its music in Bad Kissingen for the first time this spring – we are proud and happy that we can now hold the 37th edition of the recorder festival under the best conditions after two years of live interruption. A warm welcome!

Traditionally, it starts on Ascension Day, we welcome our guests on 26 May and are delighted to be able to experience the new premises of the Regentenbau in the Franconian world cultural heritage site of Bad Kissingen with you for the first time during 4 days. Such beautiful bijous make it possible for us to fully enjoy events ranging from small recitals to chamber music concerts to large music exhibitions and to experience new listening experiences.

I am not exaggerating when I promise you the very best acoustic conditions for our festival. The Rossini Hall, in which most of the concerts take place, allows us to experience the music in an extraordinary and filigree way, in the exhibition it is much quieter and thus more concentrated due to the distribution in several rooms, and there is also the possibility to withdraw into rooms and test an instrument in peace or to exchange ideas with like-minded people.

In such a difficult time, in which there is also uncertainty as to whether and how events can take place, we have decided, after long preparations in the town of Bad Kissingen, but also in terms of events in the team, to expand our traditional recorder festival days and to present the individual formats for this in intimate formations.

The 7 festival concerts will take place unchanged and it is my pleasure to present interesting and inspiring artists to you this year, there are many well-known names and some debuts that will catch your attention. Old music in a new guise continues to be the motto of our concerts, and I am personally looking forward to the new guise in many different ways. The Prize-Winners’ Concert will be presented in 2022 in cooperation with the German Music Council, and recorder is currently available here in a branching duo.

We mostly experience recitals with recorder and transverse flute in different instrumentations, but have also developed new formats that are exciting additions to our festival days: On Friday and Saturday evenings, we present late night events with two new generation artists who shed new multimedia light on our instrument in 25-minute sound installations.

And before the magnificent Max Littmann Hall is converted into the largest exhibition space, we will present a Festive Opening Concert for the first time on Thursday evening: the award-winning ensemble of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin will perform works by Telemann and Vivaldi here and we will thus inaugurate the Regentenbau in a festive concert setting. On Sunday morning, the Fluteman Show awaits you in the Kurtheater, and on Thursday afternoon we invite all those who feel like playing themselves: The Intrada will take place under expert direction and we will also hold the Master Class on Friday morning open to the public for all of you.

We hope that this wide-ranging and varied programme will encourage you to attend our concerts, but let me also assure you that with the Festival’s excellent exhibition management, we will be able to organise the trying out of instruments, the lingering on the Festival grounds and much more with the most modern means and the highest safety precautions in such a way that it will be a joy for all.

I look forward to presenting you with some of the most interesting recorder players and ensembles, but also exhibitors who have not been able to share their instruments and new releases with you for so long, as well as performers of today, and I am excited to be able to experience the recorder festival days with you: the place where we all come together and celebrate, enjoy, exchange ideas and let ourselves be inspired by the incomparable atmosphere, sounds, beautiful instruments and valuable contacts.

Cordially, see you in May,

Yours, Maurice Steger

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