Orgelfrühling Steiermark
Welcome to the website of Orgelfrühling Steiermark festival!
We look back on a successful festival year 2024 and would like to take this opportunity to thank all our partners, supporters and sponsors, the many helpers and artists and, last but not least, our audience for their commitment and for making an extraordinary series of concerts around the organ with many wonderful musical experiences possible.
2025 Activities
For a variety of reasons, there will be no Orgelfrühling festival in its traditional form in 2025.
The festival requires a structural reorganisation, which will take time and work.
But even if there is no Styria-wide spring festival with numerous live concerts and events in the usual form this time, we will remain active and committed to the organ in the region - and hopefully also connected with you, our audience!
Stage Concerts
We are pleased to announce a new concert series in Graz starting in March.
Gunther Rost, artistic director of the Orgelfrühling festival, will be presenting the organ in the Stefaniensaal, the main concert hall of Graz, on selected afternoons throughout the year as part of the new stage concert series Buehnenkonzerte. In a compact, one-hour format, you can share the stage with him, experience the organ up close and get a first-hand insight into the world of the organ from him and his wife Ute Rost, also a trained organist and presenter of the stage concerts.
2025 marks the 275th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's death. Appropriately, the first series of stage concerts, under the title of ‘TOCCATA+’, will each feature one of the famous toccatas by the great JSB alongside another later composition of the same genre. The first stage concert will take place on 20 March.
Visit the stage concerts website for more information and tickets for the events: it's well worth it!
Choir and Organ
On 7 May, a choir and organ concert will take place in the Herz-Jesu-Kirche in Graz in cooperation with the church music at this parish.
Jakub David Smešný will play Charles-Marie Widor's famous 5th organ symphony, while the Graz Boys' Choir "Grazer Kapellknaben" under the direction of Matthias Unterkofler will sing compositions by Bruckner, Vierne, Caccini, Memley and others on the theme of “Ave Maria”.
Admission is free, donations are requested.
>> go to concert website
On 11 June there will be another concert with vocal and organ music, this time in the Patrizikirche Hollenegg.
Entitled "Unter Sternen, über Schatten" (‘Under Stars, Above Shadows), the concert is dedicated to the Romantic era. The Cantus Stuttgart chamber choir under the direction of Jörg-Hannes Hahn sings works by Brahms, Reger and Wolff, while Gunther Rost plays Mendelssohn on the Erler organ.
Tickets for €10 are available via the following link - children under the age of 14 are admitted free of charge.
Orgelland Online
The Orgelland Online recording series, featuring selected instruments from throughout Styria, is to be continued in 2025.
We will announce new releases on several online platforms. Meanwhile, we invite you to watch the project's previous productions as videos or download them for free as stereo or surround sound recordings from the website of the Orgelland Steiermark association.
Review
In 2024, the Orgelfrühling Steiermark was dedicated to the motto ‘Dreamtime’. In a review of the past season, you can look back on last year's festival with its events all about Night and Dreaming.