In two important new compositions Heinz Winbeck has paid tribute to major antecedents: Lebensstürme [Life’s storms] after Schubert and Jetzt und in der Stunde des Todes [Now in the hour of death] as a reflection on Bruckner’s 9th Symphony.

The Alte Oper Frankfurt is devoting its traditional composer portrait for the opening of the new season this year to the renowned English composer George Benjamin. Key works from his output, including the chamber opera Into the Little Hill, will be presented by the Ensemble Modern, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and the Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester in September and October. A symposium for and with the composer takes place on 17 September under the title “Sometime voices”, also in the Alte Oper. George Benjamin is composer-in-residence at the Klangspuren Festival in Schwaz in Tyrol, Austria, this autumn (8 - 24 September).

A three-movement night music work is Manfred Trojahn’s Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre, composed in 2002 for Sabine Meyer: a versatile game with the tone colours of the clarinet. The Rhapsodie will receive its Swiss premiere on 3 March in Bern, given by Julian Bliss (clarinet) and the Bern Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins.

Trojahn is composing a new opera for Netherlands Opera: Orest, to the composer’s own libretto, will be premiered on 8 December 2011 in Amsterdam in a production by Katie Mitchell. The conductor will be Marc Albrecht.

Music by Heinz Winbeck is the starting point for a new ballet by Jochen Ullrich: a Winterreise (Winter journey) after musical and thematic motifs by Schubert, receives its staged premiere on 26 February at the Landestheater Linz. The composer combines a new work Lebensstürme after Schubert’s piano sonata with Schubert songs and his own Winterreise – Stations for 19 solo strings and horn (1996). “Whether this Winterreise represents a journey back, a reminiscence, a kind of aftershock or whether it also mirrors symptoms of our time” is a constant question for Winbeck in his study of this composer. The production in Linz will be conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.

The church opera Ich Hiob („I, Job“) by Thomas Daniel Schlee, who was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize for Music 2010 earlier this year, has been performed at the Kasseler Musiktage in the Alte Brüderkirche, Kassel. In Ich, Hiob, Schlee bridges the gap between different genres. The entire action of the work centres around the character of Job, “whose profoundly human experience of suffering is”, according to the composer, “familiar to each and every one of us, to some extent at least”. The role of the protagonist in the Kassel performance is sung by Markus Schäfer (tenor), and the conductor is Daniel Geiss.

Soprano Marisol Montalvo and Markus Bellheim (piano) gave the first performance of septemberalbum. lieder für sopran und klavier after texts by Ron Winkler on 7 November at the Kasseler Musiktage. The composer describes Winkler’s lyric poetry as “unagitated, fragile, sometimes rather laconic – simply beautiful”. He has striven to create a music which “should be tender and unassuming, and reflects the vital lightness of these almost wafted words.” septemberalbum received its Swiss Premiere on 15 November in the Gare du Nord in Basel. Philipp Maintz’s opera Maldoror was performed at the Theater Basel until 22 November.

L’ubica Čekovská’s orchestral piece Adorations receives its first German performance on 24 April in Gera conducted by Howard Arman. The Slovakian composer is Composer-in-residence with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Altenburg-Gera in the 2010/11 season. Čekovská’s most important future project is her opera Dorian Gray after the novel by Oscar Wilde. It will be premiered at the Slovak National Opera in Bratislava in a production by David Pountney on 22 November 2013. The libretto is by the British writer Kate Pullinger, and the conductor is Lukasz Borowicz.