Pianist Kit Armstrong delights listeners with a Friends Project in a historic setting by Wittenburg's late-Romanesque Church of St. Bartholomew.
Image credit: © Alle Rechte vorbehalten
On 22 August, the Music Festival of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania was again hosted by Wittenburg's late-Romanesque Church of St. Bartholomew, just a few steps from the FlourWorld Museum, Germany.
That Germany's third biggest classical music festival honoured the town 70 kilometres east of Hamburg for the third time was largely due to the commitment of the Stern-Wywiol Gruppe. Torsten and Volkmar Wywiol are not just business men and patrons of the arts; they are also one of the region's biggest employers. On an area of 60,000m² in the town, the group company SternMaid produces food ingredients on state-of-the-art compounding plant.
"Our aim is to make our Wittenburg site, with over 300 employees, an important cultural centre of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania as well as an industrial enterprise. So we are especially pleased that the American star pianist Kit Armstrong has brought his Friends Project to the freshly renovated church", Volkmar Wywiol explained. "Business partners can become friends, too: music and culture create bridges across all barriers and frontiers and help to consolidate these friendships", the company's founder said, giving an insight into his corporate philosophy. The Stern-Wywiol Gruppe consists of twelve specialist firms that develop functional ingredients for food and feed production and supply them to customers in over 130 countries.
"Friends Project I" is the name Kit Armstrong had given to his performance of Mozart's chamber music in Wittenburg. The 26-year-old pianist and composer, who only recently opened the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York as a soloist and is already acknowledged by critics as a "musical phenomenon", had arranged some of the pieces specially for the evening and presented them together with the Schumann Quartet and other award-winning virtuosi.
The concert itself was an experience. The restrained interior architecture of the church enabled the audience to concentrate fully on the music. Unpretentiously, with great ease and virtuosity, the artists introduced their listeners to Mozart's chamber music. Besides residents of Wittenburg, the visitors, who filled the church to the last seat, included SternMaid employees and numerous customers. During the interval, they joined in informal conversation in the town"s romantic market place, renewing old friendships and starting new ones.
After the concert, Torsten and Volkmar Wywiol invited visitors to a reception at the nearby FlourWorld Museum. It was here, where the Wywiols have established another cultural institution in Wittenburg, that a further link with the concert emerged. The exhibition on the cultural history of flour as a staple food also reveals a connection with classical music and Mozart. For concerts at the imperial court, the artists always wore special wigs. The fashion of the time dictated that these had to be white. Those who could afford to follow the trend dusted their wigs with powder – or otherwise, like Mozart, with flour in order to save money. A story that is presented at the museum – along with the lifelike reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman, the first person known to have consumed cereal products. The Ötzi figure in Wittenburg is Germany's only officially approved reconstruction of the sensational prehistoric find from the Ötztal Alps. Together with over 3,500 flour sacks from all the corners of the earth, these exhibits draw the visitor deep into the myths surrounding flour and offer information on agriculture and cereals as part of the history of man.
The guests enjoyed the evening as a platform for an informal and relaxed exchange of ideas – or, as one lady visitor wrote that same evening, "The Stern-Wywiol Gruppe is strong and creative in the international world of ingredients, but just as creative in taking employees and friends on unconventional journeys off the beaten tracks of commerce and widening their horizons. I thank you for this wonderful experience!"
For more information visit the FlourWorld website, HERE.
