Festival publications
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rainy days 2023
The rainy days festival 2023 centres around the theme of «memory»: how we process sound; how we associate music with specific events, people, places and time; how music helps our brains to function, to improve, to remember; how a single sound can instantly bring back memories; and ultimately, what it means to listen and to perform in relation to memory.
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atlântico 2023
The Lusophone world spans several continents and in this ethnic and cultural melting-pot, diversity is only topped by creative richness. The music from Portuguese-speaking countries has always occupied an important position in the Philharmonie’s programming, and the heart-warming autumn festival atlântico pays homage to this legacy. During a week of concerts and events for children and young people, the Philharmonie opens its doors to numerous lusophone artists, and symbolically also to a significant portion of Luxembourg’s population.
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rainy days 2022
More than any other art form, music has the power to transport us to other universes, or even create them anew. Contemporary music has always aimed to invent or discover new sonic worlds – whether through unfamiliar playing techniques, advanced technology or simply wild imagination.
In 2022, rainy days invites the audience to 21 concerts, performances and installations featuring 16 world premieres and new works, to explore (not only sound) worlds beyond our own: spiritual resonances for orchestra, digital data networks, dream-like journeys through virtual realities, immersive physical environments, idiosyncratic vocal soundscapes, poetic puppetry as well as sounds of birds, forests, melting glaciers and outer space… -
atlântico 2022
For more than a week, atlântico presents multiple events featuring music from the Lusophone world, whose citizens make up a considerable part of Luxembourg’s population. In addition to António Zambujo, who opens the festival, the diversity of the Portuguese scene will be represented by jazz saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, fado singer Aldina and the piano and electronics duo of Joana Gama and Luís Fernandes. Closing the festival will be Cape Verdean singer Mario Lucio while singer and cellist Dom La Nena will add a delicate Brazilian touch. The youngest visitors can also attend workshops and a performance by the artist Victor Gama who will produce a large exhibition of homemade instruments.
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rainy days 2021
The festival rainy days has much to celebrate in its 2021 edition, including 20 years of rainy days and 15 years of rainy days at the Philharmonie. This calls for festivities that were delayed by a year due to the pandemic. In 2000, the festival was founded by composer Claude Lenners and percussionist Guy Frisch. Their mission was to offer a platform for the latest developments in contemporary music in Luxembourg.
Since the opening of the Philharmonie in 2005, rainy days has found its home here. In keeping with the festival’s spirit, the anniversary edition looks to the future, presenting 26 world premieres and new works. The spectrum ranges from electronic performance to musical theatre to orchestral works, celebrating the diversity and creativity of contemporary music. -
atlântico 2021
The festival atlântico once again celebrates the diversity of music from the Lusophone countries – the 2021 edition features the exceptional Brazilian artist Gilberto Gil, the velvety voice of Luísa Sobral from Lisbon, and the catchy zouk rhythms of Sara Tavares. The ensemble Divino Sospiro discovers Portuguese baroque repertoire, while the Ciné-Concert O Táxi N° 9297 takes the audience deep into the world of a breath-taking thriller. Nor have the youngest been forgotten: new adventures with Mr. Pinto await. Finally, on the late Saturday evening of October 16, the entire foyer vibrates with the sound of the Cape Verde Islands during an exhilarating party.
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rainy days 2019
less is more – rainy days 2019
The festival rainy days explores reduction in contemporary music and focuses on the essential: «less is more».
To limit oneself in order to achieve something greater: this idea is gaining ever more importance in a society of excessive consumerism that yet longs for reduction (#decluttering). In the face of climate change, responsible behavior is increasingly associated with restraint. In the arts, reduction has a long history. Musically, it can assume many different points of focus: a single idea, a particular principle, a solo instrument, minimal means, graphic notation or limited material such as a single note, gesture or playing technique. -
atlântico 2019
This year, in the hushed atmosphere of the Salle de Musique de Chambre, three concerts of the festival atlântico allow us to get closer to the artists. The generational and stylistic spectrum is wide: the young Mozambican singer Selma Uamusse explores her spiritual roots, the Carlos Bica & Azul Trio dig into the richness of jazz and, with Sérgio Godinho, one of Portugal's best-known artistic personalities enchants the audience with imaginative and poetic music.
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rainy days 2018
From resonance of the spheres to propaganda tool, music has always struggled to find its place in the world around it, and this is especially true of the music of our complex present. In 2018, rainy days explores how contemporary music participates in realities beyond the concert hall: as political statement, as part of identity, as an experience of social situations, as industrial aesthetic, as personal history or by incorporating concrete sounds of everyday life through field recordings. The festival brings sound worlds outside of the Philharmonie into the concert hall, while also taking concerts to private homes and offering performative walks that enable the listener to perceive the city’s soundscapes in situ. It presents the search for an appropriate musical language to speak of the most pressing issues today, explores «third spaces» between analogue and virtual worlds and pays homage to female pioneers of electroacoustic music who created new gender realities with their work early on.
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atlântico 2018
This October, an ocean of music is sweeping over the Philharmonie for the third time. The musical tradition of the Portuguese-speaking countries reveals its impressive stylistic diversity, sometimes intimate - for example with the Brazilian singer and guitarist Vitor Ramil -, sometimes more dynamic - as during the "Cape Verdean Party" -, sometimes featuring living legends such as Cristina Branco or Tito Paris, reunited on this occasion with the Portuguese singer Sara Tavares, but always including surprising discoveries. For this edition, atlântico is also offering events for all ages, starting with a introduction to Fado for babies.
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rainy days 2017
In 2017, rainy days follows its feelings and invites you to join in, posing the crucial question: «how does it feel?» In 16 concerts, installations, performances and a conference, with 17 world premieres, the festival discovers the many ways in which today’s music can express, evoke, transform, exploit or avoid emotion to touch, affect, move, disturb or keep you at a distance.
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atlântico 2017
The Philharmonie is obviously a temple of music, but like any space dedicated to culture, it is also conducing to questions... Where does the music we listen to during this festive week come from? What is its origin and in what context was it created? We are pleased to invite you to seek the answers to these questions and to explore these musical cultures through their fascinating histories and the artists who bring them to life on stage, through various concerts but also through a selection of texts you will find in our catalogue.
Our wish is that you take as much pleasure in discovering the Portuguese-speaking world and its musical traditions as we do in introducing them to you. -
atlântico 2016
A new festival that celebrates the musical traditions of the lusophone countries, «atlântico» is symbolic of the Philharmonie Luxembourg as an active forum in which different cultures and musical genres meet.
The entire Philharmonie will, over the course of a week, beat a lusophone rhythm, through the original blend of fado and bossa-nova of António Zambujo, the golden voice of Mayra Andrade, star of the new generation of Cape Verdean singers, the swing of Mário Laginha, the complicity of the transatlantic duo formed by Júlio Resende and Moreno Veloso, the urban sonorities of Dead Combo, the melancholic and soothing songs of Waldemar Bastos, or the samba of the Fala Brasil Trio. «atlântico» will be a moment of encounters and exchanges, discoveries and celebrations. The musical explorations suggested here will be echoed in the texts, the literary excerpts, the questionnaires to the artists and the magnificent series of photographs by Alessandro Puccinelli that you will find on the following pages.
Join us at the Philharmonie for a unique and far-reaching journey to the sounds of the lusophone world…
