In his orchestral works of recent years, composer Miroslav Srnka has further divided the orchestra into its “individual sections” and in particular, has individualised the body of strings, leading ultimately to the creation of a gigantic “superorganism”. In his new concert composition “Is This Us?” two solo horns confront a group of many instruments – an orchestra woven into many individual voices. This confrontation is inspired by a passage from Winter by the Norwegian author Karl-Ove Knausgaard, a reflection on identities: “For we ourselves, we are always who we are, whereas for others who we are is something which gradually emerges, something which arrives and then disappears again.

The Jena Mahler cycle enters the home stretch. Short works by Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini preceding each Mahler symphony have become an integral part of concerts for audiences. At the beginning of March, “Anima” was performed before Mahler’s Eighth.

Oliver Leith’s “Dream Horse” (2018), for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra, sees the heartfelt and surreal collide. Its eclectic text reflects the scope of the London-based composer’s imagination – by turns sweet and subversive – drawing on the 1923 John Wayne Western musical “Riders of Destiny”, a list of horses named ‘Dream _____’ and Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned”; Thomas Adès premiered the 15-minute work at the Tanglewood Festival. “Taxa” (2013), recently taken up by Ilan Volkov and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, also reflects his quietly anarchic character; the piece superimposes five expressive postures from mixed groups of instruments – “Sustain”, “Echo”, “Flutter”, “Grind”, “Remnants” – to create a teeming whole that riffs on a fragment of Bach.

The French composer Yann Robin, born in 1974, is one of those composers who work with cycles. At the outset, a piece might not have been conceived as part of a series; it can, however, be the first one of such and inspire research into the problems of form, of sound, of material. It is often an encounter with a musician which sets things in motion. For twenty years Yann Robin has collaborated with the Ensemble intercontemporain and its soloists, with pieces and cycles conceived for and with them. Each exchange, each search leads to the discovery of instrumental potential and unimagined possibilities, and to pushing back the limits of tessituras.

The experience of fragility in people’s own existence and the collective threat have found manifold echoes in the arts. New orchestral works by Matthias Pintscher, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini, Miroslav Srnka, Beat Furrer and Charlotte Seither are powerful testimony to an exceptional period.

Philipp Maintz has focussed more intensively on the organ in his output in recent years. In a conversation, reproduced here in excerpts, he answered questions from his editor Robert Krampe.

Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini’s “Dies illa” is about “the proverbial ‘fear of dying’, the moment which will confront us all and which we suppress as best we can throughout our lives”. He composed the choral-symphonic work for the 200th anniversary of the Basler Gesangverein setting a text by Alain Claude Sulzer. In this work for chorus and orchestra, the moment of death is depicted in five verses from different perspectives. Scartazzini makes reference to the second movement of Brahms’s “Deutsches Requiem”. In this movement, “Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras”, the Swiss composer sees an “almost baroque-like memento mori” which has always captivated him. The premiere on 17 and 19 November 2023 in Basel Cathedral is conducted by Facundo Agudin with the Basler Gesangverein and the Basel Chamber Orchestra.