The Bregenz Festival features the Czech composer Miroslav Srnka this year: his chamber opera Make No Noise (World Premiere Munich 2011) will be performed on 17 and 19 August 2016 in a new production by Johannes Erath, with Dirk Kaftan conducting. The roles of the two protagonists Hannah and Joseph, who meet on an oil platform and find each other through their speechlessness, will be sung by soprano Measha Brueggergosman and baritone Holger Falk in the first Austrian performance. Ensemble Modern plays the orchestral part. On 21 August Srnka’s Eighteen Agents for 19 Strings will be performed by the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gérard Korsten. (Photo: Vojtěch Havlík)

“Something wonderful which suddenly appears before you.” The picture of the “beautiful vision” is a metaphor for the aura of sound created in Matthias Pintscher’s Violin Concerto Mar’eh. The chamber music-like transparency is now further unfolded in a version for violin and ensemble. The Ensemble intercontemporain gives the premiere of this version on 23 March 2016 in the Paris Philharmonie with Hae-Sun Kang (violin). The orchestral version can be heard before on 10–11 March in Geneva with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, also conducted here by the composer. The soloist is Renaud Capuçon.

Charlotte Seither has been commissioned to write Recherche sur le fond for the Ensemblia Mönchengladbach Festival. It is an orchestral work which examines polyphonic linearity. “What interests me is the radical quality of a form which is completely at a standstill in itself, and in which everything grows apart, without its architecture having to set down all too evident markers,” says the composer. The Niederrheinische Sinfoniker give the premiere of the work, conducted by Graham Jackson, on 10 June in Mönchengladbach. Seither’s All’aperto for 16-part chamber choir is performed on 7 and 9 July by the SWR Stuttgart Vocal Ensemble conducted by Celso Antunes at the RheinVokal Festival in Koblenz, and then in Stuttgart.

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.