Next Huelgas Generation
We are delighted to celebrate Paul Van Nevel's 80th birthday in 2026, marking over 50 years of leading the Huelgas Ensemble! He remains in excellent health, full of energy, and is planning new musical adventures. True to his visionary spirit, he is already looking ahead: after careful consideration, he has selected his successor - Achim Schulz - to gradually take over the leadership of the ensemble, ensuring its continued success in the decades to come.
Achim Schulz
Born in Munich, Achim Schulz studied church music, organ, harpsichord, and choral conducting, before studying solo singing at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and the Basel Academy of Music with Kurt Widmer and Burga Schwarzbach (Basel, Lucerne, Vienna). He undertook further studies with Hans Hotter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
He worked for ten years as Kurt Widmer’s assistant as an accompanist. Furthermore, he assisted Robert Spencer in English Song Classes at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has also worked as a singing teacher for many years.
As a concert singer, he has performed throughout Europe, Canada, the USA, and South America.
Since the age of sixteen, he has conducted various choirs and ensembles. For over ten years, Achim Schulz directed his own festival for early music in Alicante (Spain) and is regularly invited as a guest conductor by various ensembles.
Achim Schulz has been closely connected with the Huelgas Ensemble for many years. A core singer since 2008, he has shaped all major productions and is deeply familiar with the ensemble’s repertoire and spirit.
He first conducted the ensemble at the Huelgas festival in 2023 in Talant (France) with a performance of Lamentations by Tiburtio Massaino. In 2025 - under the direction of Achim Schulz - Huelgas presented a programme dedicated entirely to the music of the Middle Ages (Bolle spiegels van de middeleeuwen) to a large international audience at the Laus Polyphoniae festival in Antwerp. In 2026, Achim Schulz conducted the Huelgas Ensemble in the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, among other venues, performing music by Orlando di Lasso.
Thanks to his specialization in early music and broad expertise - his repertoire spans from the earliest medieval pieces to the Baroque - he will continue the ensemble’s tradition, while bringing fresh inspiration.
Would you like to be among the first to introduce the ‘Next Huelgas generation’ to your audience? Here are some programme suggestions under the direction of Achim Schulz:
Tears of a Lover
Monteverdi, Pari and de Rore in the face of love and loss
This programme takes us into the profound world of grief, despair and longing, in which the composers Claudio Monteverdi, Claudio Pari and Cipriano de Rore set the human experience of love, suffering and loss to music in a profoundly moving way.
At the centre is Claudio Monteverdi's La Sestina - Lagrime d'Amante al Sepolcro dell'Amata, a masterpiece that powerfully expresses the despair and inexorable decline of vitality of a loved one in the face of death (his wife, who died three years earlier, as well his 18 year old deceased student Caterina Martinelli, who was intended for the title role in the opera L’Arianna) through the artful use of the sestina form, so emotionally introduced to us by Francesco Petrarca.
Claudio Paris' Il Lamento d'Arianna takes up the theme of the abandoned lover and depicts Arianna's lament after she was left behind by Theseus on Naxos. Paris' setting, which draws on Monteverdi's famous Lamento d'Arianna Madrigal, captures the intensity of Arianna's pain and despair with expressive melodies and rhetorical figures that immediately draw the listener into her emotional turmoil.
This programme is sublimated by a selection of five of Cipriano de Rore’s eleven Le Vergine stanzas, in which Francesco Petrarca expresses his love for Donna Laura and his grief over her death in 1348 as a religious veneration of Mary. Together, these works reveal music's ability to reflect the most complex and profound human experiences. They invite us to empathise with the nature of love, and the transience of life and its comforting powers.
La Vulnerata
Music of Consolation Before the Scaffold
The point of departure is the English Jesuit College of St. Alban in Valladolid (Colegio de los Ingleses), founded in 1589 by Robert Persons; a parallel foundation followed in Seville in 1592. The college served as a refuge for English Catholic priests and other persecuted compatriots in comparatively more open Spain - offering protection from the state persecution and execution threatened under Elizabeth I.
The library of St. Alban’s in Valladolid contains a copy of the first - and at the same time only - mass and motet book by Alonso Lobo, who served as chapel master in Seville and later in Toledo, at the same time that El Greco was also active there. This choirbook was printed in Madrid with the collaboration of Tomás Luis de Victoria and was used in the liturgical life of the college.
The library also preserves compositions by William Byrd, whose son found refuge at the college. These works - supplemented by a motet by Orlando di Lasso - were sung weekly before a statue of the Virgin Mary: la Vulnerata (‘the Wounded One’). In her, the English priests saw themselves reflected as martyrs.
The statue itself had been damaged by Spanish troops when English ships under the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, attacked Cádiz in 1597. In 1600, the Vulnerata was brought to St. Alban’s College - as both a symbol and an act of reverence toward the Catholic martyrs who, in the England of Elizabeth I, remained faithful to their beliefs while awaiting death.
The programme unfolds around Alonso Lobo’s six-voice Missa Maria Magdalena. Added to this are the eight-voice motet Ave Maria and the widely renowned six-voice funeral motet Versa est in luctum, composed for the death of Philip II.
Polyphonic chants from Gradualia I & II by William Byrd, together with John Dowland’s extensive three-part motet Though mighty God from his Fourth Book of Songs or Ayres (for four voices), complete this ‘triptych’: Lobo – Byrd – La Vulnerata.
Convex Mirror of the Middle Ages
Technical innovations from the age of the cathedrals toward the poetic subtlety of the chansons
The convex mirror, visible in Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Wedding’ of 1434 and in Robert Campin’s Triptych of Heinrich von Werl from Cologne of 1438, makes it possible to perceive the confined space in its entirety. The astonishing precision of perspective and the lifelike attention to detail are presumably owed to an achievement in optics: the mirror lens. If one compares Campin’s paintings - with their delicate draperies, almost photographic portraits, or the chandelier reflected in van Eyck’s convex mirror - with Giotto’s painting around 1310, it immediately becomes clear that a technical innovation paved the way for new conceptions of space.
Perhaps something similar was happening simultaneously in music. In the notation of music during the transition from the ars antiqua through the ars nova to the so-called ars subtilior, the notated structures and creative techniques on paper became more virtuosic, complex, and expressive. In a figurative sense, the ‘lens’ of the convex mirror opens up a more differentiated way of listening - perhaps a more intimate listening.
The new possibilities of musical notation unfold into a poetic, epic world of refinement: the chanson, with its complexity of rhythm and melody, of expression and colour - where literally ‘colour’, the colour, becomes a new means of subtle notation.
Every European listener has probably at some point experienced the medieval Gothic cathedral as a space - as an overwhelming experience.The ‘Age of the Cathedrals’ was also the age of intimate chambers in which chansons and love songs were performed. Whether expressing secular or sacred love, it was not confined within four narrow walls.
The programme features works from the 13th century to the middle of the 15th century. Alongside anonymous masters are compositions by Guillaume de Machaut, Oswald von Wolkenstein, Johannes Ciconia, Nicolaus Zacharie, Antonio da Teramo, Solage, and Guillaume Dufay.
Theobald’s Legacy
European Soundscapes of the Medieval Kingdom of Navarre
Beginning with the songs of the troubadour king Theobald I of Navarre, a far-reaching musical network unfolds, offering insights into the sound worlds that may once have resonated at court. Through dynastic connections, these influences extend from Sicily across France to England and are reflected in the works of composers such as Juan Cornago, Jacob Senleches, Trebor, Guillaume de Machaut, and John Dunstaple, preserved in the renowned codices of Montpellier, Montecassino, Old Hall, Chantilly, and Trento 88.
The result is a deliberately non-chronological musical parcours which, across more than two centuries, conveys multifaceted impressions of the music that may once have flourished in the Kingdom of Navarre.
The programme is anchored by the mass Ayo visto lo mappamundi, written in the English style by the Spaniard Juan Cornago, who - through the Montecassino Codex - stands in close connection with Blanca I of Sicily.
