(28.3.2013) This year’s new opera production at the Handel Festival is devoted to his first stage work, Almira, which the 20-year-old composer wrote for the Oper am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg – with clear references to Venetian opera, such as the characteristic mix of serious and comic scenes. His wonderful sense of melodic invention, to which he frequently returned,  is already found here. The premiere of Axel Köhler’s new production is on 7 June. Andreas Spering conducts this first performance using the Halle Handel Edition.

(4.4.2013) Swiss composer Dieter Ammann is the focus of the Witten Days for New Chamber Music from 26-28 April 2013. His concert piece for violin and chamber orchester unbalanced instability will be premiered by Carolin Widmann (violin) with the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, conducted by Emilio Pomàrico. The programme also includes piece for cello and CUTE for flute and clarinet, as well as String Quartet No. 2 (Distanzenquartett)  On the opening evening Dieter Ammann will be improvising around midnight in the Unikat Club.

(7.4.2013) The Berner Symphonieorchester performs the 2nd movement of Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini’s Viaggiatori after Dante’s Divina Commedia on 16 and 17 May, conducted by Mario Venzago with the chorus and soloists of the Theatre in the Kultur-Casino Bern. In Viaggiatori for soloists, chorus and orchestra, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini has set to music “situations of being in transit, travel stories from places which, as it were, no (longer) exist – noisy and quiet places of imagination and philosophical conjecture”. The second movement is an elegy, an introverted mourning on words from Canto IV of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

(3.4.2013) Matthias Pintscher’s Bereshit for large ensemble receives its premiere on 24 May with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by the composer. Bereshit is about the creation of things, the creative act and its incomprehensibility. “The composition emerges from the idea of freeing an entire compendium of sounds, gestures, rhythms, orchestrations from an original state of sound,” says the composer. Shortly before this, on 16 May, Matthias Pintscher conducts the British premiere of Chute d’Étoiles. Hommage à Anselm Kiefer with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Glasgow.

(1.4.2013) Miroslav Srnka's My life without me is a gripping monodrama of a woman in dialogue with her world, which has turned upside down. Following the Ensemble Intercontemporain’s premiere of the “Dialogues” from My life without me in 2008 in Paris, they present the first performance of the work at the Festival Prague Spring in the composer’s native city on 19 May. The soloist is Claron McFadden (soprano), and conductor is Tomáš Hanus.