“The Day the Cicada Sang” allows music and scenery to interweave, creating a dense web of music, words and images. Not only is the music performed, but it itself becomes part of the story; it is its theme, at the same time lending the story its form.

Inspired by once forbidden dances, La Ninfea combines what doesn't really belong together - tango & chaconne, sarabande & waltz, from Monteverdi to Mozart, from Handel to Piazzolla. A musical bridge across centuries and conventions - this music has never been heard like this before!

“Heh, what are you doing? I really don't need anyone to deliberately play the detuner here!” exclaims Christian Heim, the gambist of the ensemble La Ninfea, indignantly to a very exotic bird after it has simply turned the pegs of the viol... 

A concert hosted by the ensemble that plumbs the darkest depths of musical healing and the brightest praises of recovery, with pieces by composers such as Marais and Purcell. Put together as part of a birthday concert for a pharmacist, the programme was also released on CD in March 2020. It brings together pieces about illness, recovery and even remedies: oil of barley, drosera (sundew), medicine for spider bites or a musical gallstone operation. The medicinal themes find their way to the stage in compositions by Purcell, Kircher, Lully, Charpentier and Marais.

When thinking of a true London gentleman, the first thing that comes to mind are top hats and courteous behaviour, elegance and elevated status. Recorder, too? But of course! Well, the fine gentleman didn’t (yet) have a top hat around 1700, but of course it was excellent manners to have a recorder in your pocket for you to, for example, serenade the lady you adored at any given moment - a welcome occasion for Barbara Heindlmeier and her colleagues to be “Gentleman for a Day”.

“An evening full of goosebump music”

(Weser Kurier)

A prisoner who was allowed to make music in his cell... The man in the iron mask died in the Bastille around 1703 and was buried in an unknown location. From descriptions by his contemporaries, we learn that his privileges included the possession of a lute and the latest music prints, but his identity will probably remain a mystery for a long time to come and continue to exert such a strong fascination on us.

Inspired by once forbidden dances, La Ninfea combines what doesn't really belong together - tango & chaconne, sarabande & waltz, from Monteverdi to Mozart, from Handel to Piazzolla. A musical bridge across centuries and conventions - this music has never been heard like this before!