Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini's new work Kassiopeia for ensemble has been premiered in Basel. The title Kassiopeia refers to the constellation of the same name: the five stars which form a distinctive "W" in the night sky are a symbol for Scartazzini's five-movement composition. The Collegium Novum Zürich gives the first performance of Kassiopeia on 22 January 2009 in the Gare du Nord Basel, and the following day in the Tonhalle Zurich.

The 47th Festival di Nuova Consonanza in Rome presents Beat Furrer as both composer and teacher: at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia he directs a composers’ workshop with concerts. The Ensemble Algoritmo will perform several works in a portrait concert on 17 December, including aria for soprano and ensemble, lotófagos for soprano and double bass and spur for piano and string quartet. The London Sinfonietta presents In Portrait: Beat Furrer on 18 January. This concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall conducted by the composer will include the British premiere of Xenos for ensemble, as well as Presto.

In the flame of the dream is the poetic-pictorial title of Vadim Karassikow’s new ensemble work, written for the Klangforum Wien. It consists of pieces for one instrument which can be performed individually, or can be combined into duos, trios, quartets or tutti in every possible combination, and performed together simultaneously. The first performance took place on 5 December 2009 in the Konzerthaus, Vienna.

Miroslav Srnka who has been awarded a Composer’s Prize by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation for 2009, has taken texts and subject matter from director Isabelle Coixet’s film My life without me for a work commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain. This received its first performance on 28 November 2008 in the Cité de la Musique. American soprano Claron McFadden played the role of a young woman who, faced with her imminent death, arranges the lives of her family after the event. David Robertson conducted the elite French ensemble.

At the Festival Eclat in Stuttgart Matthias Pintscher's first a cappella work, she-cholat ahavah ani (Shir Ha-Shirim V) for 32 voices, was premiered by the SWR Vocal Ensemble in February 2009. With Study IV for Treatise on the Veil for string quartet, first performed in Salzburg in January 2009, his cycle about the paintings by Cy Twombly is finished.

Manfred Trojahn’s fifth opera La Grande Magia after a play by Eduardo de Filippo was premiered at the Semperoper Dresden in May 2008 and was acclaimed both by the audience and the press. Trojahn describes the subject of this comedy of manners as “a quite dreadful story” , in which the singer Marta allows herself to be spirited away from her marriage by a magician so to speak.

After his piano concerto attracted a lot of attention in Cologne, Paris and Munich, described by Gerhard Rohde as “a dramatic, exciting, almost uncannily enigmatic ‘double’”, Beat Furrer has been working on several compositions and a new music theatre piece. In lotófagos II he has developed his explorations into spatial acoustics further in collaboration with IRCAM in Paris, and at the same time has been writing a piece on forgetting.