Linz Europa Tour 2007 – 2009

Hubert von Goisern, Austria’s musical performer extraordinaire, is traveling Europe’s great river roads as Linz09’s goodwill ambassador. On the first leg of his successful international tour in Summer 2007, he sailed his floating stage down the Danube, giving concerts along the way at still-unfamiliar venues in the East of this continent that is still in the process of growing together.

This year, his mobile musical performance platform is heading up the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal to Rotterdam. This isn’t just a way for Linz09 to get literally closer to the people of Europe; it’s meant to fill the empty formula of “intercultural encounter” with genuine live musical experiences and, above all, with real interpersonal communication.

The Linz Europa Tour is a great example of how to live up to the promise inherent in a Capital of Culture. This and numerous other productions being staged under the aegis of Linz09 are giving international audiences an idea of what Linz is all about.

Within Austria, on the other hand, we aim to sustainably alter an image that has hardened into the hackneyed stereotype of a blue-collar town shrouded in a pall of industrial haze. Nevertheless, in congenially going about this corrective, we have no intention of leaving our city’s true-to-life history out of consideration.