How exciting, how diverse, how beautiful are the spaces that Graz and Styria have to offer for musical experiences. From June 19 to July 20, 2025, the Styrian Styriarte Festival will be dedicated to exploring these magnificent spaces under the motto SPACE&SOUND.
Making space for music and its history to be heard: what other festival does this with as much passion as the Styriarte, the Styrian music festival that takes place in and around Graz? For 40 years our concerts have been drawing audiences from far and near to experience the magic of music in combination with the Styrian capital’s fantastic locations. In and around Graz, in the Styrian countryside, the festival finds unique settings for musical performances.
The medieval, Renaissance and Baroque buildings are revealed in all their incomparable splendour when they echo with the music that is theirs! It was 400 years ago that work began on Eggenberg Palace to turn it into a model residence. To celebrate the anniversary, the Styriarte tells stories of this Styrian Escorial, from an intimate evening of lute music to the “castrato of Eggenberg” and a Baroque opera. The Graz’s mausoleum and castle also provide spaces that the festival can fill with sound. For over 100 years Graz’s Stefaniensaal has been one of the world’s most beautiful concert halls. It first opened in 1908 with a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth and this experience will be recreated at the 2025 festival.
Helmut List Halle, with its excellent accoustics, makes an infinitely flexible space-sound performance area, whether for experimental contemporary music as in Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s piano performance or for the glorious sound of early music with two orchestras in convivial dialogue, conducted by Alfredo Bernardini. Eddie Luis performing the greats of Austrian pop and Elisabeth Fuchs paying a symphonic tribute to the legendary Freddie Mercury push the accoustics to the limit. And yet Mei-Ann Chen and the Styriarte Youth Orchestra aim to rise even higher when they take off into the endless expanses of space.
Outside Graz we find sources of life energy: reed and water music for wind instruments at a pond in Pöllau; the Haydn Festival with Michael Hofstetter at Stainz Castle; at Vorau Abbey, where the Styriarte recounts the next chapter of its Attems Saga. A musical environment is a living environment – of this Jordi Savall too is quite certain. In summer 2025 he gives us two examples: Tudor England with the intimate strains of violas da gamba and voices, and Creole music, which spread over two continents and a dozen nations over the course of 400 years. The scope of music knows no bounds.
