Freedom and wanderlust
Two concerts by the Collegium Musicum Weimar at the end of June in the Schießhaus
Under the motto ‘Freedom and wanderlust’, the Collegium Musicum Weimar invites you to two orchestral concerts. The programme on Friday, 27 June and Saturday, 28 June, both at 7:30 p.m. in the Weimar Schießhaus, includes works by Ethel Smyth, Witold Lutosławski, Jean Sibelius and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
Sebastian Ickstadt will take over from P. Mauricio Sotelo-Romero as conductor. Tickets are available for 8 Euros, concessions 5 Euros, from the Weimar Tourist Information Office and at the box office.
The concert will open with the overture to the opera ‘The Wreckers’ by British composer Ethel Smyth. Composed in 1906, the opera premiered in Leipzig in 1911 under the German name ‘Strandrecht’. Smyth was inspired by stories told by locals during her walks through Cornwall to write her musical theatre work, which is about brave resistance against piracy on the English south coast.
Witold Lutosławski's ‘Little Suite’, composed in 1951, draws its ideas from Polish folk songs, which are musically processed in a very complex and energetic way.
Finnish composer Jean Sibelius composed his symphonic poem ‘Finlandia’ as a hymn to freedom, which later became a spark for the Finnish independence movement.
The concert programme of the Collegium Musicum Weimar remains thematically far north with the main work of its two concerts: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy drew inspiration for his Symphony No. 3, nicknamed ‘Scottish’, from a trip to the British Isles in the footsteps of Mary Stuart, among other things.
The Collegium Musicum Weimar was founded in 1994 out of a desire among school music students to perform demanding symphonic works themselves in an orchestra. Prof. Michael Berg was the first conductor of the Collegium before it was handed over to the students of the Department of Conducting and Opera répétiteur studies.
The Collegium has been an official ensemble of the Weimar Music University since 2018 and consists largely of students of music education and musicology. The musical rehearsals are enriched by students from the Bauhaus University Weimar, the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the University of Erfurt and professional amateur musicians from all over Thuringia.
In weekly rehearsals and a rehearsal weekend each semester, the orchestra works on a challenging concert programme. Sebastian Ickstadt has been the conductor of the Collegium Musicum Weimar since the summer semester of 2025.
[10 June 2025]