Le Festival de Wiltz -Enjoying Art in an Open Setting

By Armand Kovacs, 23.07.2019

Since summer is here and we’ve actually had some extraordinarily nice weather in Luxembourg the last couple of weeks, we managed to actually take advantage of the wonderful evenings by attending the Festival de Wiltz.

What is Festival de Wiltz? It is a Performance Art Festival that takes places at the Castle in Wiltz, North of Luxembourg, and I was actually impressed to find out that it is one of the biggest and oldest open air festivals in the whole Eurozone (it is already at it’s 67^th edition!). One of the nicest things is that attending this festival also gave us an opportunity to visit the city of Wiltz as well as the wonderful region it is part of. This itself is enough of a reason to try and visit this really  pittoresque area of the country.

Unfortunately we only managed to attend two performances (Scala & Kolacny Brothers (BEL) and Morcheeba (UK)). Both felt really at place at this event managing to take advantage of the open air setting and ramp up the people attending.

First we went to Scala & Kolacny Brothers, a Belgian girl choir that gave us spectacular renditions of popular songs such as Coldplay’s Viva la Vida as well as introduced us to their repertoire with known songs such as Engel and Hungriges Hertz. It was actually really impressive to hear the interpretation of classic rock sound through the voice of a choir. We had many moments when we just had goosebumps because of the depth and weight of performance. Throughout the show, they managed to win the hearts and souls of the people attending and it was a common sight to see and hear people clapping the rhythm or giving the group standing ovations after each and every song. Steven and Stijn Kolacny managed to take the roles of show presenters, pandering to all people of the audience by switching between German, French and English which was also a really nice touch.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Next we went to Morcheeba, a UK trip-hop band that we managed to see last Thursday and was the most wonderful way to end the work week. They gave us an exclusive show [organised by Den Atelier] in which they went through the best of all decades starting from blues to psychedelic rock, reggae dub and electronic hip hope. It was just so nice to listen to their dream inducing performance which was aimed at relaxing the audience and putting them in a state of heightened senses. Personally, I am a huge fan of trip-hop but Morcheeba has always come on top because of the warm voice of the lead singer Skye Edwards. For a lot of moments we had our gaze on their guitarist who performed some extraordinary pieces and solos and who managed to bring a whole new dimension to a performance that was already everything that we could have wished for.

• 

• 

For sure, next year we will attend even more of the Festival de Wiltz because it turned out to be such a perfect experience. Everything from the organization of the event to the performers we managed to see were on spot and made us feel great. I really recommend you try it out yourself because it will be an unique experience: seeing and listing to beautiful art in the courtyard of a castle.

If you wish to find out more about the city and region of Wiltz you can find more details here. Even if you do not want to go at the festival you could give the city a try and see it’s beautiful “chateau” and surroundings.

If you want to find out more about the Festival de Wiltz you can find them here. They are still running up to the 25^th of July, next are Pit Dahm on the 24^th and Etta Scollo on the 25^th. If you are worried about transport they actually have some really good options that you can find on their website. Attending the shows was just the perfect way to end some of our summer days and if you have any spare time and want to do the same you will have an awesome experience.

#Wiltz, #FestivalDeWiltz, #Scala&Kolacny, #Morcheeba