Made in Tirol

Innsbruck Festival [ENA] Every serious early-music festival needs one evening in which it looks not outward, to Basel, Berlin or Amsterdam, but inward — at the local scene that has been quietly incubating around it for half a century. "Made in Tirol", the three-part programme at Quartier St. Bartlmä is the 50th Festwochen jubilee's way of asking that question — and the answer, on the strength of the artists involved, will be gratifying.

Held in the Halle of the industrial-hall wing of the newly re-invented St. Bartlmä complex, the evening is designed as an unhurried triptych in which listening, mingling and drifting are all part of the dramaturgy. The opening panel belongs to the Cardinal Points Ensemble, a young Tirolean formation that grew up inside the Innsbruck early-music biotope: soprano Lea Bodner, the Waldauf sisters Laura-Maria and Magdalena on violins, cellist Antonia Neussl and Elias Gabriel Huber at the harpsichord and viola, together since 2023.

Their signature programme, "Himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betrübt", is a beautifully argued survey of high-baroque affect that runs from William Hayes and Buxtehude to Bach and Fux — with the special claim on Fux that only an Austrian ensemble can quite make. What one recognises immediately, from their concerts in Völs and at the Schwaz Franziskanerkloster earlier in the summer, is a sound that has already learned to breathe together: the two Waldauf violins finish each other's sentences, and Bodner's soprano sits inside the texture rather than on top of it. This is the confident tone of a Tirolean generation raised on historically informed practice as a native language.

The evening's second station is entrusted to Vierhalbiert, the Innsbruck-based baroque quartet whose name — "quartered" in the punning sense of both a four-part ensemble and a slicing-open — declares its intention to open the repertoire from the inside. Their contribution promises the evening's boldest crossings: Biber's Rosenkranzsonaten placed next to contemporary compositions and electronic re-writings, an approach that only works if the players understand Biber's scordatura writing not as a museum object but as the eccentric, physical, spiritually daring music it always was.

The final panel is the solo turn of the Tirolean lutenist and theorbist David Bergmüller — born in Hall in Tirol in 1989, trained by Hopkinson Smith at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and Rolf Lislevand at Trossingen, and today one of the two or three lutenists genuinely reinventing what the instrument can carry. His latest album Know Thyself (Neue Meister, October 2025) — a swarm of twenty-three Renaissance lutes, a theorbo in dialogue with a Moog synthesizer, a lullaby for his daughter — indicates the direction the St. Bartlmä set will take: acoustic sources refracted through delay lines and quiet electronics, historically informed and technologically curious in the same breath.

Bergmüller's own compositions in the printed programme place him on both sides of the score, as performer and creator. Held in a hall whose brick-and-steel acoustic is unforgiving of anything decorative, "Made in Tirol" is the evening on which the Festwochen quietly demonstrate why they matter as a regional institution, not just as an international showcase. Three ensembles, one province, six centuries of sound. A festival worth attending precisely because it does not sound like anywhere else.