The Bayerische Staatsoper and its former Music Director Kirill Petrenko commissioned the opera “South Pole” from the Czech composer Miroslav Srnka in 2016. Now Music Director of the Berliner Philharmoniker, Petrenko has commissioned a major new symphonic work from Srnka for his orchestra. His “Superorganisms” receives its world premiere conducted by Petrenko. Superorganisms are forms of life in which homogenous living beings work together synergetically and organised between themselves – a “multiplication of the positive power of individuals”, as the composer explains. Typical examples of superorganisms are ant colonies and swarms of bees. An example of superorganisms in human culture is the symphony orchestra – and this is where Miroslav Srnka’s new piece begins.

Miroslav Srnka has composed a concerto for the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and the Gürzenich-Orchester Cologne. François-Xavier Roth conducts the world premiere of "Standstill" on 11 September in Cologne. Three questions on his new work to the composer.

A commission from the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and the Cologne “Eight Bridges” Festival offers a glimpse into the world of the complete “other”: in Beat Furrer’s “VI Gesänge für Vokalensemble und Orchester” to texts by the Argentinian writer Sara Gallardo someone speaks who is at a crossroads, who knows about a secret life of things. Its songs are entreaties, they call to the different woods, the animals, the messengers “of the one who just is, who was never born and will never die”.

For each of the ten Mahler symphonies, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini has composed a short orchestral work which contemplates the music and intellectual world of Mahler’s great works. A chance coincidence now brings three world premieres in quick succession. “Incantesimo”, the fourth work in the cycle commissioned by the Jena Philharmonic and its Music Director Simon Gaudenz, precedes Mahler’s 4th Symphony with a setting of Joseph von Eichendorff’s “Abendständchen”. Sounding as if from a bygone age, “Incantesimo” begins in the related key of E minor and extends its harmonic range from verse to verse. “Einklang” for orchestra precedes Mahler’s 5th Symphony. These two works receive their world premieres on 28 April and 19 May 2022 in the Volkshaus Jena.

Charlotte Seiter has composed “zu welcher stunde” [“at which hour”] for orchestra for a musical journey through time by the Mitteldeutsche Kammerphilharmonie. The title of the concert in Stendal on 28 April 2022 is “1831 – Die Abschiedsstunde” [“The parting hour”], and combines the Seither premiere with works by Haydn, Krommer and Pleyel. “Paintings” for five-part chamber choir is a commission for the anniversary concert of the LandesJugendChor Rheinland-Pfalz, and receives its world premiere on 23 April in the Christuskirche Mainz conducted by Jan Schumacher.

This is the title of one of many concerts for Dieter Ammann’s special birthday. On 26 May 2022 the Basel Sinfonietta under Baldur Brönnimann performs the Violin Concerto “unbalanced instability” with violinist Simon Zgraggen plus the orchestral triptych “Core – Turn – Boost”. Two concerts with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra under Michael Sanderling feature “Boost” on 11 and 12 May, and on 31 May 2022 the programme includes “glut”, “Venite a dire. Raummusik”, and a world premiere of the “Morceau en forme d’improvisation”.

Philipp Maintz places an instrumental protagonist from his chamber opera “Thérèse” after Émile Zola at the centre of his new ensemble work “c’est une volupté de plus”: the accordion, as the secret protagonist in the septet, forms a kind of musical continuation and a portrait of the main character Thérèse Raquin, whose affair ends in the murder of her husband and suicide: “her search, her hope for an escape and the associated futility which becomes despair – this all becomes ‘music out of music’”, says Philipp Maintz.