BORDERLANDS: St Helens

Van Diemen’s Band invites you to explore the historic borderlands of Europe.

For centuries, generations of composers wrote music as their homelands changed ownership under their feet.

Shifting borders and the meeting of cultures at the edges of the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires created a fascinating musical backdrop to the tumult of the Thirty Years War. An atmosphere of division, boundaries, climate and common ground – themes that resonate strongly even in our lives today.

Van Diemen's Band Artistic Director Julia Fredersdorff has curated a program that explores the sublime simplicity of music of the early baroque period. Works startling for their originality and spirited evocations of battles and dances, as well as a new commission by Donald Nicolson, written especially for the program — all performed with the raw freshness that audiences have come to know from music on gut strings and instruments of the past. 

Don't miss this perfect symbiosis of old and new.

Photographer credit: Albert Comper