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.

At the Prague Spring International Music Competition 2008, Clarinettino by Ondřej Kukal was one of the set pieces. This demanding work, yet one easily understood by audiences, is an important addition to the repertoire for clarinettists.

The BBC London commissioned a new orchestral piece from Matthias Pintscher. Pourquoi l’azur muet. Musique de “L'espace dernier” pour sopran, mezzosopran et orchestre was premiered in London on 10 October by Claudia Barainsky (soprano), Claudia Mahnke (mezzo soprano) and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Kazushi Ono. Parts of Pintscher’s music theatre piece L’espace dernier about Arthur Rimbaud have been assembled to form this new work. The German premiere was given by Anu Komsi (soprano), Claudia Mahnke (mezzo soprano) and the Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart under Krysztof Urbanski in April, 2009 in Stuttgart.

Commissioned by the Basel Sinfonietta, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini has composed Siegel his latest work for orchestra with voice. The premiere in Basel on 20 January 2008 with Claudia Barainsky (soprano) and the Basel Sinfonietta under Peter Hirsch was followed by the first German performance on 22 January in Gütersloh.

For Miroslav Srnka, born in 1975 in Prague, the Czech tradition is extremely important, in the sense of a musical mother tongue which has shaped him, alongside the great masters of modern music of the twentieth century such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Messiaen and others. He lists Dvořák and Janáček in particular as such models, who introduced new qualities to music – characteristics like sound contrasts, colour, gesture and dynamic progression.