Artistic
Director
Music
Director
Dramaturgical
Director
Festival
Organisation
2017
HIDALGO Pilot
Classical music at 380 nanometers
In November 2017, HIDALGO set off for the first time: in the space-sound installation “Orplid”, we created a dream world inspired by the aesthetics of the trance and goa scene. Before this first pilot event, we had spent weeks working on models, experimenting with black light and spraying more than 300 square meters of iron grating in an old factory building with lots of helpers. Over several nights, we hung the huge spatial sculpture in the pop-up hotel Lovelace in Munich’s old town. The result was a room full of darkness, fluorescent shapes and will-o’-the-wisps. More than 300 people wanted to experience this, they lined up far out into the street. The pilot was successful because!
2018
HIDALGO I
The old, bad songs
“The HIDALGO is on the loose”, reported Bayerischer Rundfunk in September 2018. Two years of intensive preparation culminated in our first festival week. We played with contrasts in five events: old and young, classic and modern, mainstream and niche. The first edition was conceived as a journey through the song cosmos. We began in the baroque Residenzsaal, which we transformed into a classical music club with lots of bass, then moved on to a salon evening in the barbershop and left in the alternative-urban epicenter of Munich, the Bahnwärter Thiel, poetryslammer*women clash with controversial songs with an old-school image of women. We deconstructed Schubert with a cryptic performance and celebrated the finale with baritone, soprano and grand piano in the Minimal Club. The adventure had begun.
2019
HIDALGO II
Intoxication
Music generates happiness hormones. In short: music gets you high – and the high connected all our works in 2019. We celebrated the Dionysian: the desire to lose oneself, to dissolve boundaries and to escape from everyday life. We distributed the drug “Lied” at street concerts and among the antlers of the hunting and fishing museum. There we enriched the song material with electric guitar, synthesizer, video art and lots of silence to create a trance party. In the Gasteig, we combined modern poetry, new compositions and a video production for the extremely elaborate Gesamtkunstwerk. The song was available in all forms – and for the first time also instrumental music for the newly founded HIDALGO festival orchestra, which led a raucous “wild parade” on the old slaughterhouse grounds.
2020
HIDALGO III
Failure
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the motto of our third edition was clear: what interested us about failure was that it is a very intimate moment that everyone knows about, but hardly anyone likes to talk about. In eight formats, we artistically illuminated the taboo topic from all sides. Our audience saw musical theater with a boxing match, could confess via smartphone and sit between abysmal climbing walls at the orchestra. They felt the social distance of a Beethoven installation in a parking garage, saw the dance of a migration biography and debated in an electro club. They found our song duos in around 100 mini-concerts all over the city. Three prominent losers and a failed instrument ended the festival with a Fuck Up night as livestream.
2021
HIDALGO IV
R*Evolution
In our fourth edition, we called for R*Evolution – and fought more politically than ever against sexualized violence and man-made climate change with song, music and all the arts. For the first time, we moved into a permanent festival center in the former “Sugar Mountain” concrete plant for a few days. Our festival orchestra played a wild 14th Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich as an indictment of the destruction of our planet and its resources – with contributions from a “Fridays for Future” activist and an environmental expert. In the music theater RAPE & CULTURE, we used dance, sound design and the voices of those affected to make our contribution against the abuse of power in the classical music scene. “The Hidalgo Festival lives up to its high standards”, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
2022
HIDALGO V
Classic Upcycled
Don’t be afraid of breaking taboos or traditions! In September and October 2022, we invited people to “Come into the workshop of stored sounds”. “We polish the triads and flex the coloratura. We screw light and sound art onto it, add sport and politics and courage and anger and look at the good piece in black light.” We presented the interdisciplinary formats in urban locations such as the Boxwerk, the techno club “Bahnwärter Thiel” and the Utopia, but also as a bridge to the high culture scene in the transformer hall of the Gasteig HP8. “What an enrichment of the classical concert experience”, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “An intense experience”, said Deutschlandfunk, our audience was “unusually diverse” and “unusually young”.
2023
HIDALGO VI
Man Machine
In times of ChatGPT and omnipresent debates about artificial intelligence, we dedicated our sixth season to the motto HUMAN MACHINE. With the mobile installation REFUGIUM, we delivered audiovisual art in a van: For more than six weeks, we toured Munich’s neighborhoods with it, plus guest performances in Siegburg, Cologne and Stuttgart. We also decentralized our new edition of the STREET ART SONG format with around 80 mini-concerts throughout the city, with special cycle routes to various performances for the first time. Fantastic young artists competed against each other at the Grand Song Prize at Gasteig HP8 – and most recently we were guests at Microsoft Germany’s headquarters: with the song lab WHO ARE YOU, we explored what happens when artificial intelligence meets artistic people.