It’s for the 20th year in a row CLASSISSIMO summer festival keeps surprising Brussels’ public! It takes place at The Royal Park Theater and takes seriously its responsibilities to deliver the royal quality of the performances on the stage and outside of it! On the terrace!
Front picture : © photo Yelena van Kharitonova
For the last three years Marc Grauwels is an Artistic Director of CLASSISSIMO with Sybille Iweins on his side as a General Coordinator! This is the team! No more, no less and it works perfectly well in terms of needed collaboration! Many volunteers and employees are behind too and most of them are young!
Sybil Iweins, general coordinator of CLASSISSIMO, Marc Grauwels, artistic director, and our CULTURIUS journalist, Yelena van Kharitonova © photo Yelena van Kharitonova
I had to challenge my assumptions about the festival as many other visitors I talked to! The place is famous for seniors and retired people! And, indeed, how nice to see all those loyal participants with their abonements coming in! According to Marc Grauwels, that’s the ultimate goal of the festival:to attract younger and more international audiences to the festival! He personally greets all of us in three language every evening: in French, Dutch and English and during the evening all the three are used extensively, so everyone understands!
Marc Greuwels is also an exceptional flutist, who performs during the festival along with the other artists! His multitasking skills are to die for! It’s his third year as the chef, he took over the leadership from CLASSISSIMO’s founder George Dumortier, who is not with us anymore!
© photo Yelena van Kharitonova
Everyone enjoys the space of this Royal Park Theatre, which was not always the case! Now the festival is one of the summer highlights in the city, collects full houses and always sold out! The festival is under high patronage of the city of Brussels and was opened on the 5th of August by Philipe Close in his video inaugural speech! The festival accessible by all means for different groups: €15 is a general admission for everyone and €0 for children and students! This way the festival would like to become even more accessible for all! What not to like?!
© CLASSISSIMO
The festival connected masters with students during the first opening evening with a co-lab under the following name: Transmission! That’s exactly what’s needed now: intergenerational integration! Many different styles of music are on the agenda from the 5th until the 11th of August for us to enjoy: from French Baroque of the of the Court of Louis XIV and XV, Music from Spain and Latin America with Piazzolla, from Dvorak and Brahms to Verdi and A Night at the Opera, from Mozart to Bizet! The message of the Festival is crystal clear: the classical music in all its forms is a uniting factor and a part of the well-being of our lives!
Something very special has to be said about the sense of humor and how it’s utilized during the festival! It’s a true cherry on the cake! The way how to spice-up each and every soirée! The tool to make classical music attractive! The language to make everyone feel at ease!
And while other people enjoy garden parties and rooftop gatherings, we, while laughing out loudly, enjoying after-performances at the terrace of the theatre with the view to the Federal Parliament of Kingdom of Belgium!
“Troika Dance” in La Monnaie/De Munt, De Keersmaeker and Mriziga
