Summer Sounds Zug is still going strong

The Zug Summer Sounds festival will be celebrating a small anniversary this year: 25 years. But the concept is and will remain the same, despite successfully rejuvenating itself year after year. It will kick off again on 6th July 2025.
 

It is a kind of musical nomadism. Since its inception, the hallmark of the Summer Sounds (Sommerklänge) music festival in Zug has been the changing, unconventional performance venues. High-level chamber music is placed in the context of everyday social spaces – or also far away from them. Barns, workshops, warehouses and water reservoirs become stages., as well as gardens, multi-purpose buildings, chapels and community halls – music knows no spatial boundaries. The list of places where the Zuger Sommerklänge have already been heard is long. And it continues to grow this year.

The festival's 25th anniversary fills its founders with pride and gratitude. ‘The concept of a travelling musical stage still works perfectly after all this time,’ say musical director Madeleine Nussbaumer and her partner Peter Hoppe. It’s probably this deliberate inconsistency in the sense of constantly changing concert venues that makes the programme so eagerly awaited year after year. The necessary consistency, on the other hand, is reflected in the careful selection of performers and the high musical quality.

Chamber music from several eras
For the start of Sommerklänge 2025 on 6 July, Nussbaumer and Hoppe have found a venue that truly deserves to be called ‘exclusive’. With its characteristic curved building shape, the brand-new headquarters of Partners Group AG in the Unterfeld in Baar houses a hyper-modern auditorium that is also acoustically ideal for music. With an expanded line-up, the Chamäleon Ensemble, conducted by Madeleine Nussbaumer, will perform a programme of works by Sergei Prokofiev, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ernst von Dohnányi.

Hardly inferior to a concert hall: the auditorium of Partners Group AG in Baar          Photo: zvg

For many years now, Johannes Brahms has been a frequently performed composer at the Sommerklänge. In a concert on 13^th July in the Kalandersaal of the former Papieri in Cham, the accomplished trio of Ronald Bräutigam on piano, Esther Hoppe on violin and Christian Poltéra on cello will focus on his works composed during his stay in Switzerland: two sonatas and a piano trio are thereby on the programme.

Percussion dominates the third of a total of five concerts. On 20^th July, the Trio Colores – who are not appearing for the first time – will play contemporary works that have been specially arranged for the venue. This venue is also already familiar: the Bau-Werkhof Rust near the St. Adrian chapel in Arth offers a particularly unconventional backdrop, and made a lasting impression on audiences a few years ago.

A concert by the Vertavo String Quartet on 27^th July will be surrounded by the neo-baroque splendour in the light-flooded, richly stuccoed chapel of the Zugersee Psychiatric Clinic in Oberwil. The four women will thereby interpret works by Carl Nielsen, Erwin Schulhoff and Robert Schumann.

The Maienmatt community hall in Oberägeri, a multi-purpose facility with lots of woodwork, has a completely different charm. The typical style of the 1980s will meet Baroque music literature here: a top-class ensemble, including professional trumpeter Immanuel Richter and organist Johann Treichel on the harpsichord, will perform exciting adaptations of Baroque works by Bach, Vivaldi, Molter, Marcello and Telemann. This fifth and final concert of the 2025 Summer Sounds series will take place on 3^rd August.

Further details about the programme and tickets can be found on:
www.sommerklaenge.ch