It is over seventy years since the publication of the first volume of the Complete Works of Christoph Willibald Gluck. Now the edition, which made many works accessible for the first time, is almost complete. A preliminary assessment.

Posterity has never really been satisfied with Süßmayr’s completion of Mozart’s Requiem, so that many other completions have been made. Now Michael Ostrzyga (b. 1975) has presented a new version. As conductor, composer and Music Director at the University of Cologne, Ostrzyga is someone with practical experience. But he is also a composer, trained and experienced in analysis, arranging, orchestrating and creating works in different styles. He has immersed himself long and intensively in Mozart’s musical language. In conversation, he told Christoph Schulte im Walde about his approach.

To celebrate the 200th birthday of the Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg in 1884 Edvard Grieg was commissioned to write an open-air cantata for the ceremony. But he also refers to Holberg in his instrumental music. The result was a “powdered wig piece” (as Grieg wrote to his publisher) that hearkens back to Holberg’s era – a historicising suite of baroque dances for piano, ranging from an exhilarating prelude and several dance numbers to a Bachian “air” and an impetuous “rigaudon”. Later Grieg arranged his suite for string orchestra. This version became one of his most popular compositions. For the new scholarly-critical Urtext edition (Bärenreiter-Verlag) Christoph Rinne-Schroeder has meticulously examined the original print and compared it with previously neglected performance material annotated by Grieg himself.

The impact of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s operas, which cannot be over-estimated, is generally well-known. A series with four albums, arranged by vocal range, now makes his arias available for teaching and performance.

Since November 2016, the groundbreaking German music encyclopedia „Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart“ has been available online, accessible for institutions and personal subscribers at www.mgg-online.com. The online edition, based on the second print edition of MGG with some 19,000 entries written and published by over 3500 authors between 1994 and 2008, includes MGG Online is a continuously updated and growing database of revised and new articles. Since its launch in 2016, approximately 100 articles per year have been updated or replaced by new articles, and new entries have been added.

Symphonies, concertos, string quartets, piano sonatas: Jonathan Del Mar’s Beethoven editions are convincing from the first to the last note.

A significant expansion of Bärenreiter’s publishing programme. Alkor represents the stage and orchestral works of Max Brockhaus Musikverlag, founded in Leipzig in 1893. Named after its founder, the company had close links to the Wagner family and its circle.