Hille Perl and The Little Consort of the Aachen Symphony Orchestra open the Fonte vivace Early Music Festival with a program that places the viola da gamba at its center.
In works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Friedrich Abel, Martha Bishop, among others, the gamba can be heard both as a solo instrument and in dialogue with the ensemble.
Hille Perl, musician, gamba-player, has played music as long as she can think. For her, music is the foremost means of communication between human beings, more precise and intense and unmistakable than language, of greater emotional significance than any other experience besides love. To her, music is a means of connecting not only the past and the future but also a way of socially integrating the most conflicting aspects of existence. She travels the world, playing concerts and recording CDs with different groups or soloizing, or with her main partner, the lutenist and composer Lee Santana. They mostly perform in the field of 17th and 18th century music, but they also let the music take them to places they never even dreamed of. When she is not travelling she lives in a farmhouse in northern Germany with her family and a few chickens, horses, cats and rabbits. She passionately teaches her twelve students at the Hochschule der Künste in Bremen, Germany, everything she knows about music, playing the gamba, and how not to be jealous if someone plays better than you.
At Fonte vivace, The Little Consort, a chamber ensemble of the Aachen Symphony Orchestra, presents itself in dialogue with Hille Perl.
As part of the NRW Cultural Secretariat’s “New Paths” program, the project titled “Akzent Barock!” has been supporting the development and strengthening of a Baroque profile at Theater Aachen since 2019.
Theater Aachen and the Aachen Symphony Orchestra launched this Baroque focus with three goals: to acquire their own set of Baroque instruments for the orchestra, to further train orchestra musicians through lessons and stylistic coaching in this area, and to be able to engage musicians who play special instruments for specific projects.
In 2024, the NRW Cultural Secretariat made this support permanent. To showcase the new possibilities and ensure continued practice with the Baroque instrumentarium, Theater Aachen presents four different formats each season under the banner of “Akzent Barock!”: an opera production, a sacred work, a crossover format that places Baroque instruments in new contexts, and a concert as part of the Aachener Bachtage.
