You might imagine that Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was available in a definitive version. But the current version has been proved to contain errors in many details, reason for Jonathan Del Mar to edit the work afresh from scratch, and to provide today’s musicians with a reliable basis to work from.

Manfred Trojahn, who celebrated his 60th birthday on 22 October 2009, has been awarded the Deutscher Musikautorenpreis in the symphonic category; the prize was awarded for the very first time on 28 May in Berlin by GEMA, the German performing rights society. To mark the composer’s birthday, the Henschel Quartett is releasing a CD with Trojahn’s String Quartets I, III and IV, and gave the premiere of String Quartet IV in Düren on 10 November. Zwei Sätze für Orchester received their premiere in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, performed by the Symphony Orchestra of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig conducted by Ulrich Windfuhr.

The Frankfurt Opera opens the new season with two music theatre works which could scarcely be more different: Othmar Schoeck’s classical drama Penthesilea (after Heinrich von Kleist) is staged in the much-praised Basel production by Hans Neuenfels (first performance 4 September 2011, musical direction Alexander Liebreich) and the opéra bouffe L’Étoile by Emmanuel Chabrier (photo), recently performed several times in Germany and abroad using the new Bärenreiter critical edition. In Frankfurt, David Alden directs this French operatic jewel. The music director is Henrik Nánási, the future chief conductor of the Komische Oper Berlin (first performance 2 October 2011).

The Sonate pour violon seul marks an important addition to Jean Barraqué’s small body of works. The piece, which dates from 1949, stands at an aesthetic as well as an ideological watershed in the French composer’s life. The sonata will be premiered by Carolin Widmann on 30 november in Paris.

The performance material of Beethoven’s Fidelio, available at Bärenreiter · Alkor, is an advance publication compiled not from all, but from the major sources of the opera. It goes without saying that the standards of scholarly critical editions have been applied when converting these sources into the musical text. Still, uniform rules have not always been found for the opera's particular complex of sources or its generic and textual peculiarities. Most importantly, until now there has been no complete critical report to provide information on the sources, particularly regarding editorial decisions and the origins of certain alternative readings. Once these steps have been completed, Fidelio will appear in volumes IX/4 of the Complete Edition.

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.