Beat Furrer’s song cycle “Canti della tenebra” after Dino Campana receives its premiere at the Ultima Festival Oslo. A new work for large orchestra strane costellazioni has been composed for the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie.

(4.6.2013) Thomas Daniel Schlee’s Symphony No. 2 receives its premiere in the Musikverein Vienna. Commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, it will be premiered by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Manfred Honeck on 15 June 2013. The three-part work progresses “through darkness to light”: it begins with an opening movement entitled “Umbrae” and leads into brightness, via an extended middle movement into the open colourfulness and energy of the final movement.

After his editions of works by Beethoven and Elgar, the English musicologist Jonathan Del Mar has now returned to the works of Antonín Dvořák for a second time, following his edition of the Cello Concerto. The 7th Symphony has just been published.

Many discrepancies have arisen over two centuries in editions of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in C. The new edition by Jonathan Del Mar resolves these.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736) undoubtedly had one of the shortest creative careers of all the important composers in the canon of Western music. Within a period of just six years, his comparatively small number of complete compositions became established as his musical legacy. One of his best-known works, the Stabat mater for soprano and alto solo and orchestra, was composed in 1735/36 in the Franciscan monastery in Pozzuoli near Naples. There, Pergolesi, suffering from tuberculosis, spent the last months of his life. The work was probably first performed in March 1736.

As early as 1960, George Frideric Handel’s Dixit Dominus was published as part of the then comparatively new Halle Handel Edition (HHA III/1). Eberhard Wenzel edited this volume, primarily intended for practical performance use, and hoped back then in 1960 that it would “enrich the Handelian repertoire for church and concert hall by the addition of a valuable, interesting and strongly effective work”. This intention was more than fulfilled, and in the intervening years, Handel’s youthful, demanding Dixit Dominus of 1707 has become a quintessential staple of the Baroque repertoire.

The new Urtext edition of Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin is suitable for performing the complete work or excerpts.