Johannes Brahms composed some works in the summer holidays. Dvorák, Honegger and Krenek were railway enthusiasts. Charlotte Seither also travels a lot. She has just recently returned from a stay at the Fondazione Bogliasco in Italy. Is there an art to being creative whilst you’re on your travels? Michael Töpel put some questions to the composer.

(27.4.2015) Lucia Ronchetti develops a surreal nocturnal scene in Esame di mezzanotte, written as a commission for the Nationaltheater Mannheim. The opera is the first full-length music theatre work by Ronchetti, who lives in Rome. Written for large-scale forces of actors, solo voices, vocal ensemble, chorus and orchestra, this is her largest score to date. In fifteen scenes, the libretto by Ermanno Cavazzoni tells of the torments of Giro Lamenti in the night before his school-leaving examination, the nightmare of generations of Italian students. From midnight to the morning, a bizarre search in a library for a book full of abstruse encounters unfolds. For the premiere on 29 May 2015 the director is Achim Freyer, and the musical director is Johannes Kalitzke.

The English composer Thomas Adès is fascinated by depictions of the dance of death The famous ‘Totentanz’ in Lübeck, destroyed in the war, is the starting point for his largest symphonic work to date.

(1.10.2014) For the Ensemble intercontemporain and the Festival Musica Strasbourg Dieter Ammann has composed Le réseau des reprises, a brillant and colourful study about repetition and memory in music. The world premiere has been conducted by Matthias Pintscher.

(1.10.2014) Manfred Trojahn’s highly-acclaimed music theatre work Orest receives its Austrian premiere. Trojahn, who celebrates his 65th birthday on 22 October 2014, was acclaimed in the press for his work, premiered at the Nederlandse Opera in 2011; it was described in reviews as a “burningly intense” piece on the myth of matricide. The music theatre work will be staged by Neue Oper Wien, the amadeus ensemble-wien and the Vienna Chamber Choir in a production by Philipp M. Krenn. The conductor is Walter Kobéra. 

(4.10.2014) Philipp Maintz has composed a concerto for piano and large orchestra for the Festival Musica Strasbourg. The composer describes his work as “an exciting approach to a form steeped in historical tradition, but at no point in the compositional process did I think of breaking it down.” It receives its premiere on 10 October 2014 in Strasbourg with Jean Frédéric Neuburger as soloist and the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg conducted by Peter Hirsch. The same day his orchestral work archipel can be heard in Saarbrücken, with the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken conducted by Robert HP Platz. And finally, ferner, und immer ferner. music for organ solo receives its Polish premiere in Wroclaw on 11 October 2014 at the World New Music Days 2014, performed by Piotr Rojek.

(7.10.2015) Matthias Pintscher has described his orchestral work idyll as a shining, light image of a place of yearning. The composition receives its British premiere on 3 December 2015 in Glasgow, with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer. There are numerous first performances of Pintscher’s works this autumn. First performances include bereshit given in the Netherlands by the Ensemble intercontemporain, and his cycle Profiles of Light (Now I and II for piano and violoncello) and beyond (a system of passing) for flute in the USA. Sarah Maria Sun and Jan Philipp Schultze give the Spanish premiere of his Lieder und Schneebilder on 15 December 2015 in Bilbao. – (photo: Franck Ferville)