68 concerts at 54 venues in all 15 Heidelberg districts - for everyone and with free admission. 25 selected young musicians and ensembles performed all over Heidelberg with their creative ideas and brought people together through music at the 2022 Musikfestival.

Idea

A festival is a temporary social place and opens up spaces for cultural cohesion and social interaction through art. On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, Heidelberger Frühling Musikfestival, together with 25 young artists and ensembles and district partners and institutions, set up the "re:start" program, which celebrates culture as a basic function. With no barriers to entry and no distance between audience and stage, a variety of musical offerings were made accessible, connecting the urban community. At the same time, re:start acted as a support program for young artists who had suffered particularly from the lack of performance opportunities during the period of cultural lockdown.

The musical offerings took place indoors but also open-air. Included were family concerts, sing-along concerts, supper concerts, lunch and brunch concerts, market concerts, an Earth Hour concert, pub concerts or all-day music festivals, as well as interactive formats and workshops.

Music was played in the long vacant Wilson Theater (Rohrbach-Hasenleiser), the synagogue of the Jewish Community (Weststadt), the Tiefburg (Handschuhsheim), the CHAPEL community center (Südstadt), the Boxberg shopping center, the Emmertsgrundpassage, Café Schafheutle (Altstadt), the Heidelberg Multigenerational House (Rohrbach) and the Mensa im Marstall (Altstadt). A special venue of re:start was the train main station.

Where people go in and out every day, "KlaWIR am Bahnhof" was created during the first two festival weeks as a meeting place for spontaneous and joint music-making in the middle of the main building of Heidelberg's train station.

re:start was made possible by the foundation Fonds Stiftung Zukunftsmusik which was initiated by the main partners HeidelbergCement, MLP, Octapharma and SAP and the Musikstiftung Heidelberg after the 2021 festival was cancelled, in order to give young artists in particular a perspective for the future.

Artists and Ensembles

Artists at the beginning of their careers were particularly affected by the restrictions of the pandemic period. At the same time, they have excelled in many places with remarkable ingenuity and are burning for the power of art as never before. These young personalities gathered re:start into a unique group of curious and passionate FESTspiel ambassadors representing very different musical styles: from singer-songwriter, jazz trio, saxophone quartet to a classical band of four brothers, vocal ensemble, cello duo and baroque ensemble. In total, the group of re:start artists united 57 young people between the ages of 18 and 34. They had been in contact with each other since August 2021 and planned the programme's musical activities together with the festival team. Participating artists from all over Germany include:

Audax Saxophone Quartet, Borsch4Breakfast, CelloFellos, Cosima Soulez Larivière, Das Kolorit, Ensemble Sozusingen, Hanke Brothers, Hanni Liang, Kartoffelstampfer, Kollektiv B12, Leander Kippenberg, Leon Lorenz, Line Klenke, Maximilian Sutter, Mona Heiler and Lisa-Marie Trodtfeld, Mert Yalniz, Nicolae Gutu and Marcus Sundermeyer, Oskar Meier, Peacock Mandala, Philip Pineda Resch, Porter Percussion Duo, The JLF Project, Valerie's Voices, zahira, Zahra Sebnat