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.

Following the premiere of Miroslav Srnka’s Coronae for solo horn, which was commissioned for the thirtieth anniversary of the Ensemble Modern, the composer has now written a new work for the ensemble. Assembly for ensemble will be premiered on 15 January 2011 in the Alte Oper Frankfurt, and is a veritable ensemble concerto – a “virtuoso machine”, a fast, dynamic, rhythmically intense piece. Further projects by Srnka include a new string quartet for the Quatuor Diotima and the chamber opera Make No Noise, which will be premiered on 28 Juni 2011 at the Bavarian State Opera as part of their opera festival. 

Charlotte Seither, who has just received the highest music award from the State of Lower Saxony, the Praetorius Musikpreis 2010 for composition, has been commissioned to write a work for the beginning of the Kleist Year 2011 in Heilbronn. Schatten und Klarsein. Verse für Heinrich von Kleist für Sopran und Kammerorchester [Shadows and clarity. Verses for Heinrich von Kleist for soprano and chamber orchestra] is intended as a “portrait in sound of the beauty of Kleist’s poetry”. The composition received its first performance on 15 December, given by the Wurttemberg Chamber Orchestra and soprano Dorothy Mields, conducted by Ruben Gazarian.

Matthias Pintscher’s Songs from Solomon’s garden have been performed several times since their premiere in New York. Scored for baritone and ensemble, the work receives its French premiere on 15 December in the Cité de la musique Paris, given by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and soloist Leigh Melrose, conducted by the composer.
Matthias Pintscher has been Artist-in-Association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra since autumn 2010, working with the orchestra as composer and conductor. He conducts four concerts with the orchestra in January 2012. His Ex nihilo for small orchestra will be premiered in Glasgow on 19 January 2012. His composition is about the beginning from total darkness, about the creation from nothing.