Artistic Partnership between Vevey Spring Classic and Musée Jenisch

12 July 2024

The Vevey Spring Classic and Musée Jenisch Vevey are proud to announce the start of a long term exclusive artistic partnership. Each year, several classical music concerts will be organized in one of the museum’s exhibition rooms during the festival week in Spring. Under this collaboration, other musical events will also take place in the museum during the year with the purpose of creating synergy between music, painting, history and literature.

Musée Jenisch Vevey hosts the largest collection of Oskar Kokoschka’s works in the world. The painter lived in Villeneuve from 1953 until his death in 1980 at the age of 93. The famous Austrian born expressionist painter fell in love with the Swiss Riviera. He painted several works with Lake Geneva as subject. Kokoschka was also known as a writer, poet and playwright. This cosmopolitan man and vagabond, as he called himself, maintained a close connection with the Viennese musical society of the turn of the century. In this connection, to his legacy we credit his paintings of portraits of Arnold Schönberg, Egon Wellesz and Anton Webern. The painter was also a close friend of Alban Berg and was the lover of Alma Mahler from 1912 to 1914.

Being a passionate writer, Kokoschka’s play Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen inspired Paul Hindemith to compose his one act opera with the same title. With Wilhelm Furtwängler, they had a plan to collaborate in a new production of Mozart The Magic Flute at Salzburg Festival which sadly did not materialize due to the death of the great conductor. The concerts curated by the Vevey Spring Classic at the Musée Jenisch Vevey will focus on the many elements that bring forth the richness of the history of the 20th century and embrace the intimate relationship of the arts and culture with our region.

As the launching pad of our collaboration, we invite you to attend the event below: 

Thursday 28 November 2024, 18:30

Musée Jenisch, Vevey

J.S. Bach  Suite for solo cello no. 3 in C Major BWV 1009

Pablo Casals  El cant dels ocells (The Song of the Birds)

Daniel Müller-Schott, cello

Followed by a conversation on “Oskar Kokoschka and music” with the Co-Artistic Directors of the Vevey Spring Classic, Wilson Hermanto and Daniel Müller-Schott, moderated by Aglaja Kempf, Curator of the Oskar Kokoschka Foundation.