(7.4.2013) The Berner Symphonieorchester performs the 2nd movement of Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini’s Viaggiatori after Dante’s Divina Commedia on 16 and 17 May, conducted by Mario Venzago with the chorus and soloists of the Theatre in the Kultur-Casino Bern. In Viaggiatori for soloists, chorus and orchestra, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini has set to music “situations of being in transit, travel stories from places which, as it were, no (longer) exist – noisy and quiet places of imagination and philosophical conjecture”. The second movement is an elegy, an introverted mourning on words from Canto IV of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

By a happy coincidence, works by three composers from the renowned British music publisher Faber Music are being premiered on three consecutive evenings. The first of these takes place on 11 October 2011 in Leipzig, when the Gewandhaus Orchestra and its music director Riccardo Chailly perform Colin Matthews’ Grand Barcarolle. This is followed on 12 October by the Robert Schumann Philharmonie Chemnitz, who gives the premiere of the orchestral work Wouivres by the Dresden composer Torsten Rasch. The orchestra’s music director Frank Beermann conducts. Jonathan Harvey evokes nothing less than a global ethic in his new full-length choral-orchestral work Weltethos. This receives its premiere on 13 October in the Berlin Philharmonie with the Rundfunkchor Berlin and Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

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.