Utrecht Early Music Festival closes its circle in brilliant fashion

Utrecht remains an ideal place to take the pulse of early music, even in an edition with fewer concerts than the previous year. The festival offered 105 official performances, excluding free Fringe events and cathedral carillon concerts, compared with 128 in 2025.

That reduction did little to diminish the event’s importance. For decades, Utrecht has given space to the most dynamic, unconventional and, paradoxically, innovative part of classical music. New soloists and ensembles regularly appear, drawing on more than seven centuries of music and a vast store of works still awaiting rediscovery or a secure place in the canon.

Medieval music, often absent from broader concert programmes, has always held a prominent place in Utrecht and has attracted loyal audiences there. The edition’s title, “Giving Voice,” made a focus on the origins of Western polyphony especially fitting. Audiences heard Perotinus’s four-part organum Viderunt omnes and the similar Sederunt principes in three concerts, each offering a noticeably different interpretation.

The music reflects a decisive moment in 13th-century Paris, when the first relatively complex multi-voice works emerged alongside new ways of writing and preserving them. Because performers must interpret and transcribe an early form of notation, the same music can produce divergent sounds.

The festival’s opening concert on Aug. 28 was entrusted to the veteran Paul Van Nevel and his Huelgas Ensemble. Although the group has undergone many personnel changes during more than half a century, Van Nevel has consistently led its singers toward his ideal of lucid, aesthetically shaped polyphony, controlled closely through his hands and gaze. A performer and scholar, he has an especially deep knowledge of the sources documenting the development of the earliest rhythmic notations.