Wind Rose - Live at Hörnerfest

We drove up to Brande-Hörnerkirchen yesterday — a place that sounds like a typo but isn’t — to catch Wind Rose live at Hörnerfest 2023. I’d seen their live clips before. Smiled. Bought day passes without thinking twice.

They didn’t disappoint. Neither did the weather. It rained sideways for most of the day.

Hörnerfest is a three-day open-air festival dedicated to folk, pagan, and medieval music. There’s camping. Axe throwing. Fire dancers. Stalls full of cloaks, capes, drinking horns — you know, essential survival gear for the modern age.

This year’s headliners: Subway to Sally, Corvus Corax, and Tanzwut. It rained the entire time. Not the soft, cinematic kind. The kind that soaks into your socks and makes you question every decision that led you here. We didn’t linger on the festival grounds longer than necessary. The upside? Fewer people to dodge between overpriced mead and damp fur pelts.

Still, the atmosphere held. Metalheads, families, cosplay regulars — all soaked, all cheerful, as if none of it was even slightly unusual. Which, I suppose, it wasn’t.

The band hit the stage at 9:30 PM. I was front row — drenched, cold, stubbornly pretending I wasn’t counting down how long my feet had feeling left in them.

During soundcheck, they looked calm. Quiet. Almost reserved. I made the rookie mistake of assuming the show might follow suit.It did not.

The second they stepped on stage, the energy flipped. Francesco Cavalieri gave me one look and a grin from behind the monitor, and I was instantly reminded why we put up with muddy fields and medieval toilet situations for this.

The man radiates joy. Not forced, not performative — just loud, ridiculous, and completely sincere. And somehow, that’s the thing that sticks. It’s impossible not to get caught in it.

Wind Rose formed in 2009. Francesco (vocals), Claudio Falconcini (guitar), and Federico Meranda (keys) were the originals. Cristiano Bertocchi joined in 2014 after producing their first demo, and Federico Gatti has been on drums since 2018.

They’ve put out five studio albums and fully committed to the whole dwarven metal aesthetic—Tolkien lore, stage outfits, the works. It sounds ridiculous. On paper, it is ridiculous. On stage, it just works. Power metal has never been about subtlety. Wind Rose understood the assignment.

They played To Erebor, Army of Stone, The Battle of the Five Armies—the usual onslaught of battle anthems—and yes, of course, the cursed duo: Mine! Mine! Mine! and Diggy Diggy Hole. I will never forgive them for how loudly I sang along.

The sound? Not great. Somewhere between “acceptable” and “has anyone checked the monitors since noon?” But it didn’t matter. The crowd went wild. People were jumping, shouting, running in circles. Crowd surfers kept popping up like whack-a-mole. Everyone soaked, everyone screaming, no one pretending to be cool.

And that’s the thing. There’s something beautifully unselfconscious about shows like this. No irony. No pretending. Just a muddy field full of strangers screaming dwarven lyrics at the sky. And somehow, that’s enough.

If Wind Rose play near you, go. Even if you're sceptical. Even if you think you’re above it. You're not. Trust me. One grin from Francesco and you’ll be singing about mining rights like your rent depends on it.

And now go ahead and find my happy face in the front row 🤘