Manfred Trojahn, who celebrated his 60th birthday on 22 October 2009, has been awarded the Deutscher Musikautorenpreis in the symphonic category; the prize was awarded for the very first time on 28 May in Berlin by GEMA, the German performing rights society. To mark the composer’s birthday, the Henschel Quartett is releasing a CD with Trojahn’s String Quartets I, III and IV, and gave the premiere of String Quartet IV in Düren on 10 November. Zwei Sätze für Orchester received their premiere in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, performed by the Symphony Orchestra of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig conducted by Ulrich Windfuhr.

“People are on a journey through present-day Egypt; whilst searching for its origins, they encounter their own wilderness as an absence of memory...” Thus Beat Furrer describes the plot of Wüstenbuch. His new music theatre piece after texts by Händl Klaus, Ingeborg Bachmann and others receives its first performance at the Theater Basel in a production by Christoph Marthaler on 15 March. The first German performance takes place at Maerzmusik Berlin on 27 March. Before then, on 12 February, at Eclat 2010 in Stuttgart, Begehren was performed in a staged production by the Ensemble Modern and the SWR Stuttgart Vocal Ensemble conducted by Beat Furrer, with sets designed by rosalie. At the Konzerthaus Wien Xenos III for Percussion and Chamber Orchestra was premiered on 1 March by Ensemble Resonanz and Dirk Rothbrust (percussion).  

Beschriftung der Tiefe von innen (Inscribing the depths from inside), Charlotte Seither’s new composition for ensemble, received its world premiere on 11 December given by the Ensemble Modern in Rome (in the Auditorio del Parco della Musica). The composer is spending a year in the Italian capital on a scholarship at the Deutsche Akademie Villa Massimo. She has composed a work in which, she writes, “the low register takes centre stage”. “The merging of sounds, although they are always highly individually shaped and remain ‘subjectivized’, takes place in the process, especially in the low registers. Here, the ‘grey areas’ of deformity also always lead into the undefinable.”

On 30 November 2009, Klaus Huber celebrated his 85th birthday. The Swiss composer’s works continue to be of seminal importance for trends in contemporary music. His compositions constitute a multi-faceted lifetime’s achievement, recently recognized with two important awards: the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize and the Salzburg Prize 2009. Huber’s important works from the 1950s and 1960s are published by Bärenreiter – the period when the composer first came to international attention. One early major work above all awaits rediscovery: Soliloquia for soloists, chorus and large orchestra, written in 1959-64.

The Sonate pour violon seul marks an important addition to Jean Barraqué’s small body of works. The piece, which dates from 1949, stands at an aesthetic as well as an ideological watershed in the French composer’s life. The sonata will be premiered by Carolin Widmann on 30 november in Paris.

Philipp Maintz, who was awarded the scholarship of the Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo, has written an orchstral work for his home city of Aachen. archipel describes a group of islands which are linked under water and whose peaks project. Thus, in the archipelago, there are on the one hand ”subterranean” links to the material in his opera project Maldoror (Munich Biennale 2010), and on the other hand, it reflects a special compositional structure; however, Philipp Maintz has conceived the orchestral work as a grouping of separate parts, whose continuity and branching out is interrupted by vertical intersections.  Music director Markus R. Bosch has conducted the first performance with the Aachen Symphony Orchestra on 22 October 2008.

Manfred Trojahn, who celebrates his 60th birthday on 22 October, has been awarded  the Deutscher Musikautorenpreis in the symphonic category; the prize has been awarded for the very first time in Berlin by GEMA, the German performing rights society. Trojahn has composed sentimento del tempo. music for solo violin, two flutes and strings. ansbachisches konzert 2009 for the Bachwoche Ansbach, which was contrasted with Johann Sebastian Bach’s 4th Brandenburg Concerto in a concert given by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra on 7 August.