So your work is a philological work...
Yes, my and Franz's work, as director of the music collection of the Tiroler Landesmuseen, is to research the repertoire of that period in the Habsburg court, to find out who were the protagonists of the musical scene, who were the musicians... By now I know those personalities so well, that they are for me like colleagues, I feel like they are "living" people. I happen to feel this particularly with the personalities of the 1600s. With the 1500s I still struggle a bit, because it's more distant... (laughs).
The uniqueness of Innsbrucker Hofmusik is to put the music in its original context. Tomorrow we play Monteverdi's "Moral and Spiritual Forest," for example. Evidently we are not the only ones who have this music on the program. But what we do is to play this music in Austria and to connect it to the house of Austria; in fact Monteverdi dedicates this composition, which he wrote as an old man and which is considered his testament of sacred music, to Eleonora Gonzaga, Empress of the Holy Roman Empire and Archduchess of Austria.
The musicians and singers of the Innsbrucker Hofmusik ensemble are all quite young, like you! Sometimes you get a different idea of those who go into early music professionally...
We who do early music are the coolest! And the early music scene is very vibrant, in spite of what you might think.
The musicians and singers in the ensemble come from different centers of higher music education, such as Basel, Amsterdam, Milan. For the choice of singers I lean mostly toward Italy, because in my opinion it is currently the best school of Baroque and Renaissance singing there is. Whereas the instrumentalists are mainly from Tyrol, Austria, Bohemia, and Switzerland.
