Michael Schade & Friends: Love can do it all

In spring 2020 the International Baroque Festival Melk Abbey could not take place in its usual form. The film opens with images of empty streets and squares and tells of a reawakening after the standstill. To mark 20 years of the Wachau as a World Heritage site, Kammersänger Michael Schade and four musical friends walk the World Heritage Trail – to the Ferdinandswarte, to Spitz an der Donau, to the ruins of Aggstein Castle and to Schönbühel Castle – and then meet to make music in the abbey church of Melk.

The programme is English music of the Renaissance and Baroque for tenor, lute, recorder, viola da gamba, harpsichord and organ: songs by John Dowland and Henry Purcell, music by Tobias Hume and Matthew Locke. The small line-up followed the restrictions of the time and gives the concert its intimate, reflective tone. Agnes Palmisano and her trio and Lena Kuchling and Georg Buxhofer respond with their own arrangements of songs by Dowland.

Texts by Ingeborg Bachmann, Calderón de la Barca, Novalis and Friedrich Hebbel, read by Wolfram Berger, link the stations of the journey.