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| George Petrou’s producttion of Handel’s Deidamia at Wexford Festival Opera in 2025 with Nicolò Balducci (Photo: Pádraig Grant) |
The International Handel Festival Göttingen returns for 2026 with 96 events across 12 days, from 14 to 25 May 2026, involving around 550 artists. The headline event is a staging of Handel’s final opera, Deidamia in a co-production with Wexford Festival Opera directed and conducted by Göttingen’s artistic director George Petrou. The production debuted at Wexford last year, see my review, and Bruno de Sá, Sophie Junker, and Nicolò Balducci will be returning to their roles in Göttingen.
The festival opens with a concert celebrating the 20th anniversary of the festival orchestra, and George Petrou conducts them in a programme of excerpts from Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes, Bach’s Suite No. 3 in D major and Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. The oratorio this year is Handel’s Messiah, conducted by George Petrou with the NDR Vokalensemble and soloists Ana Maria Labin [whom we last heard in Rossini with Jakob Lehmann and Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique, see my review], Lena Sutor-Wernich, Ru Charlesworth and Drew Santini. No word, as yet, of which version of Messiah is being performed.
Visitors to the festival include soprano Julia Lezhneva with lutenist Luca Pianca, recorder virtuoso Dorothee Oberlinger with her Ensemble 1700 and soprano Bruno de Sá, recorder player Erik Bosgraaf and the ensemble filoBarocco exploring the influence of Polish folk music on Telemann, former Artistic Director of the Festival, harpsichordist Laurence Cummings with flautist Rachel Brown, and Shunske Sato and Shuann Chai present a recreation of an historic concert from 1885.
There are also concerts across the region, in Hann. Münden, Friedland, Einbeck, Landolfshausen, Osterode and Duderstadt with music from the era of the Thirty Years’ War, early Baroque vocal music for Pentecost Monday, arias from Handel’s operas, a musical dialogue between Handel and Bach, and the prizewinners of the göttingen handel competition.
Moving into the modern era, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale will be performed alongside a cantata by Matthias Weckmann with video projections by Folkert Uhde. Matthias Weckmann was an organist in 17th-century Hamburg and his cantata, Wie liegt die Stadt so wüste (How Desolate Lies the City), was written in 1663 in response to a devastating plague.
Full details from the festival website.
