What better present could there be for a composer than making his works available in the best possible form? 4 September 2024 is the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth. A season full of performances of his works awaits. And several of these will be memorable first performances, as Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag Wien is preparing new editions of the much-discussed versions of the Bruckner symphonies. These include the annulled Symphony in D minor of 1869, the first version of the Fourth, the Sixth, Seventh and the Adagio of 1887–1889 and the second version of the Eighth.

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.

He was the master of the refined chiaroscuro: Gabriel Fauré, who succeeded in composing some of the most popular tunes in fin-de-siècle French music: the fine subtlety of his sumptuous, yet serene “Pavane”, for example, which exists in numerous versions, the ethereal “Pie Jesu” from his Requiem, the “Masques et Bergamasques”. In 2024, with the 100th anniversary of Fauré’s death on 4 November, Robin Tait’s scholarly-critical new edition enables an appraisal not only of his most popular works, but also rediscoveries, such as the incidental music to “Caligula”, “Shylock” and “Pelléas et Mélisande”, orchestrated versions of his “Ballade”, “La Naissance de Vénus”, “Madrigal”, several “Mélodies” and “La Passion”, and the prelude to his major operatic work “Pénélope”.

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.

A ten-minute orchestral tutti, comprising an “archaic unison movement” and “iambic percussive accents”, opens the single movement First Symphony by Heinz Winbeck with almost elemental power. This is followed by more peaceful passages, but the basic mood of the music remains anxious and driven. In between, allusions to, or direct quotations from Gustav Mahler’s 3rd and 10th Symphonies are constantly heard, as an expression in sound of longing and evocation of a different, more humane world. Heinz Winbeck (1946–2019) ambiguously named his First Symphony “Tu solus”, which refers firstly to the Gloria of the Catholic rite, but secondly to the absolute isolation in the sense of “you are alone”, and dedicated it “to the memory of Sophie Scholl”.

Composer and conductor Carl Davis CBE passed away on 3 August 2023 in Oxford at the age of 87. A true musical polymath, Davis created soundtracks for some of Britain's best-loved screen dramas. He was the driving force behind the reinvention of silent movies in concert, and composed a substantial body of internationally acclaimed ballet and concert works.

Opera or oratorio? There is still uncertainty about the classification of Handel's "Semele". What is certain is that this full-length work is filled with musical gems and lends itself well to staged performances due to its fast-paced plot.