Opening of the 7th Chopin Festival Hamburg with Charles Richard-Hamelin (piano)

Wohltorf/Hamburg, d. 6.05.2025

PRESS RELEASE of the Chopin Society Hamburg & Sachsenwald e.V.

The 7th Chopin Festival Hamburg will open on June 12 at the Laeiszhalle and will take place until July 19, 2025

Wohltorf/Hamburg: The Chopin Festival Hamburg is taking place for the 7th time - but for the first time it is starting in the Laeiszhalle. The festival presents prizewinners of international Chopin competitions as well as participants in the 19th International Chopin Competition, which will be held in Warsaw from October 2 to 23, 2025.

"With our long-standing commitment to the Chopin Festival in Hamburg, we not only want to build a bridge between Germany and Poland, but also strengthen cultural cooperation between the two countries in the long term," says Dariusz Kwieciński, Senior Executive Director at ORLEN Deutschland GmbH.

This year's festival will open under the patronage of the Consul General of the Republic of Poland in Hamburg with a piano recital by Charles Richard-Hamelin, silver medalist and winner of the Krystian Zimerman Prize at the 17th International Chopin Competition Warsaw 2015, in the Small Hall of the Laeiszhalle on June 12, 2025 at 8 pm.

The Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, KAWAI Europa GmbH and the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Hamburg are supporting the 7th Chopin Festival Hamburg as partners.

Program

Claude Debussy
Suite bergamasque

Maurice Ravel
Sonatina in F sharp minor

Francis Poulenc
Napoli / Suite for piano

- Intermission -

Frédéric Chopin
Scherzo No. 1 in B minor op. 20
Scherzo No. 2 in B flat minor op. 31
Scherzo No. 3 in C sharp minor op. 39
Scherzo No. 4 in E major op. 54

Tickets from 17 € in the Elbphiharmonie webshop: https://shop.elbphilharmonie.de/de/sitzplatz-waehlen/41532/

Charles Richard-Hamelin has been in demand as a pianist at major festivals such as La Roque d'Anthéron and the Nohant Festival in France, the Prague Spring Festival, the Chopin and His Europe Festival in Warsaw, the Lanaudière Festival and the George Enescu Festival in Bucharest. He has appeared as a soloist with numerous renowned orchestras, including the leading Canadian symphony orchestras, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, the Sinfonia Varsovia, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and the Korean Symphony Orchestra.

He has worked with outstanding conductors such as Kent Nagano, Rafael Payare, Bernard Labadie, Antoni Wit, Vasily Petrenko, Jacek Kaspszyk, Aziz Shokhakimov, Peter Oundjian, Jacques Lacombe, Fabien Gabel, Carlo Rizzi, John Storgårds, Alexander Prior, Giancarlo Guerrero, Christoph Campestrini, Lan Shui, Otto Tausk, Jean-Marie Zeitouni, Kazuki Yamada, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Jonathan Cohen.

Organizer

Chopin Society Hamburg & Sachsenwald e.V.

with the support of the main sponsor ORLEN Deutschland GmbH

https://www.chopin-festival.de
www.facebook.com/chopinfestivalhamburg/
www.instagram.com/chopinfestivalhamburg

Press contact:
Rolf Nerlich

Kirchberg 8, 21521 Wohltorf

Mail: nerlich@chopin-hamburg.de

Phone: +49 1573 3718515

Chopin-Gesellschaft Hamburg & Sachsenwald e.V.
Kirchberg 8 8
21521 Wohltorf
Germany

https://www.chopin-hamburg.de

Herr Rolf Nerlich
0049 1573 371 8515

nerlich@chopin-hamburg.de

The Chopin Society Hamburg & Sachsenwald e.V. with its more than 120 members has set itself the task of bringing Chopin's work and that of his musical and intellectual role models, contemporaries and heirs to the widest possible audience by organizing concerts of the highest quality in an effort to capture Chopin as an extraordinary pianist and composer with a previously unheard musical language, to experience him in authentic sound worlds and to present and understand him against the cultural-historical and political background of his time. The association initiates new concert formats for music education in order to provide young people in particular with new musical experiences.
The association is the organizer of the Chopin Festival Hamburg (www.chopin-festival.de). It supports young artists on their way to an international career.
Together with its partners, it has provided musicians with alternative performance opportunities at a time when hardly any public concerts could be played, and has thus not lost contact with members and friends despite concert cancellations, but has continued to play music at a high level LIVE and offer it to the public for everyone's enjoyment.
Many concerts can be viewed free of charge as video recordings at https://www.youtube.com/@chopin-gesellschafthamburg663/streams. Most recently, the internationally acclaimed Chopin Festival performances "Frédéric and Friederike" (world premiere of a staged concert) and the piano recital "Classical meets Romantic" with Jan Jiracek von Arnim were published on the Chopin Society's YouTube channel.
We hope to reach many people and look forward to lively participation and sustained support for our events.
We finance our projects through membership fees, donations and sponsorship, e.g. from KAWAI Europe and ORLEN Germany. Each project is a permissible special-purpose operation and not an economic business operation according to the AO. All donations and other income are used exclusively for the purposes set out in the statutes.

This release was published on openPR.