(5.2.2013) Thomas Daniel Schlee’s Rufe zu mir op. 80 for organ and orchestra receives its premiere on 23 February 2013 in the Gewandhaus Leipzig, conducted by Riccardo Chailly, with Michael Schönheit as soloist. It receives its first Austrian performance shortly afterwards on 5 March in Vienna. The composition has been commissioned by Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig and Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Vienna. Thomas Daniel Schlee describes his concertante music for orchestra and solo organ as a “symphonic scene”. Its title places a sentence after Isaiah at its centre, which Schlee wants to understand “as a magical power”. “Rufe zu mir, dann werde ich dir antworten” [Call to me, and I will answer you] sets both the poetic mood and the musical programme.

[10.10.2012] After her extensive composer portrait at St. Martin’s, Kassel, at which 27 works were performed, Charlotte Seither’s new projects all place a characteristic spectral sonority at their centre.

(10.2.2013) Dresden-born composer Torsten Rasch, better known in Britain and published by Faber Music London, is now attracting increasing attention in Germany. In 2010 he set The Duchess of Malfi by Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster for English National Opera and the innovative theatre company Punchdrunk. On 23 March 2013 German opera-lovers will have the opportunity of getting to know the work, so successfully premiered in London, in a new production by Dietrich Hilsdorf for Theater Chemnitz. Music Director Frank Beermann conducts the Robert Schumann Philharmonie, which gave the premiere of Rasch’s orchestral work Wouivres in October 2011. Complementing the opera production, the orchestra premieres Das Haus der Temperamente, a suite from The Duchess of Malfi on 17 April 2013.

[10.10.2012] In his work The Absent, composed for the rainy days Festival in Luxembourg, Russian composer Vadim Karassikov develops a subtle game with perception by means of extreme reduction.

Rushing, surging, highly virtuosic contours characterise Miroslav Srnka’s Piano Concerto. It receives its Czech premiere in Prague, the composer’s native city, on 19 December 2016. The agile, glittering continuum of sound with its intense, brilliant colour values is performed by Nicolas Hodges (piano) and the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Tomás Netopil.

[10.10.2012] Three premieres by Beat Furrer can be heard in quick succession: linea d’orizzonte will be performed in Donaueschingen on 21 October by Ensemble ascolta, and Enigma V by the choir Les Cris de Paris under Geoffroy Jourdain on 26 October in Paris. With this Furrer concludes his series of five “Enigmas” for unaccompanied choir, after Leonardo da Vinci’s late “Profezie”. Furrer composed Ira - Arca for bass flute and double bass for the Erste Bank Composition Award, which receives its premiere from Eva Furrer and Uli Fussenegger on 3 November in Vienna.

Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini’s opera Der Sandmann, after themes by E. T. A. Hoffmann, receives its German premiere on 18 September at the Frankfurt Opera, taking over from the Theater Basel Christof Loy's original production. Like his first work in the genre, WUT, Scartazzini’s second opera introduces an equally exciting subject to the operatic stage. The libretto is by Thomas Jonigk, who transfers the story of the Sandman to the present, setting it in the milieu of a budding writer who inhabits a world between delusion and reality. The conductor in Frankfurt is Hartmut Keil. Further performances after the premiere are scheduled for 24 and 30 September, 3, 8, 13 and 23 October 2016. – Der Sandmann has just been released on CD: Musiques Suisses, MGB 6288. (photo: Janis Huber)