Jossi Wieler, born in Kreuzlingen in 1951, now lives in Berlin. He studied directing at Tel Aviv University, worked for many years as an acting director and has received numerous awards for his productions. Since 1994, he has also been directing music theater together with Sergio Morabito. At the Stuttgart State Opera, where Jossi Wieler was artistic director from 2011 to 2018, the directing duo created over 25 productions. At the end of February 2020, they staged Giacomo Meyerbeer's "Les Huguenots" at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

The Swiss Grand Prix Theater / Hans Reinhart Ring continues the tradition of the most important Swiss theater prize awarded by the Swiss Society for Theater Culture (SGTK) since 1957 and honors a personality or institution of Swiss theater creation. The prize money amounts to CHF 100,000.

Marco Amherd has just sat on the organ bench and performed Johann Sebastian Bach's Fugue in D major BWV 532/2 with virtuoso pedal use and great transparency at the lunchtime concert in St. Theodul Church. Now the new director of the Davos Festivals Time for an in-depth conversation. His performance as organist in a concert at the halfway point of the festival was the only one in which Amherd also made a musical appearance.

Nevertheless, the 32-year-old from Valais is omnipresent at the festival, maintaining close contact with the artists, attending rehearsals and the wonderful festival hike to Davos Wiesen in hiking boots and shorts and personally announcing every concert. After conductor Graziella Contratto, clarinettist Reto Bieri and pianist Oliver Schnyder, who was only in charge of last year's festival edition, it is the intention of the Foundation Board that Marco Amherd should once again be the artistic director. What is special about Davos, however, is that the artistic director is hardly expected to make a musical appearance here. What is needed is his expertise in selecting musicians, his network and his practical know-how as an artist. What attracts organist and choir conductor Marco Amherd to his new job? "I like making programs. I want to weave a common thread and give the concerts an arc of suspense. I also think it's important to break with conventions and find new concert forms. A lot is possible at the Davos Festival. You can be experimental here, because it's okay for something to go wrong."

The new artistic director was already confident in spring that the festival would be able to take place in compliance with the coronavirus. Instead of international stars performing standard works, each program is exclusive and produced locally. The fact that the ninety or so young musicians from fourteen countries, almost all of them under thirty, arrived safely in the town, which is 1500 meters above sea level, is thanks to the organizational talent of managing director Anne-Kathrin Topp. For many of them, this is their first performance since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

"Von Sinnen" is the name of this year's beautifully ambiguous festival motto, which will be explored with relish in the individual concerts. In the church of St. Johann in Davos Platz, Bernd Franke's expressive composition On the Dignity of Man The young, expressive Sibja Saxophone Quartet and the exquisite Davos Festival Chamber Choir under the direction of Andreas Felber vividly demonstrate their experimental side. The four highly talented musicians show their experimental side in the world premiere of from the noise of their baritone saxophonist Joan Jordi Oliver in the Davos Wiesen church. The live noises and sounds are digitally processed and sent into the church, a little too sharp in the treble. The Swiss Colores Trio enchants not only the participants of the traditional brunch at Schwarzsee in Davos Laret, when Fabian Ziegler, Matthias Kessler and Luca Staffelbach play Astor Piazzolla's Libertango let it groove. With their own complex arrangements of Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin and Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre the three young percussionists in the St. Johann church demonstrate great musicality in addition to their virtuoso skills. At the "Liebessinn" evening at the Hotel Schweizerhof, the Simply Quartet let Robert Schumann's A major String Quartet op. 41 No. 3 languish at the highest level, while actor Elias Reichert traces the demanding feelings in Robert's letters to Clara: "It has to be. Don't forget the yes."

Marco Amherd wants to "tell stories" with his programs. The connection to literature is also important to him. The young musicians, all of whom Amherd has personally selected, are open to this. Reto Bieri had also already played with the festival motto in the individual concerts and composed special programs. The Very Young Artists course introduced by Oliver Schnyder was continued this year. Amherd does not have to reinvent the wheel in Davos. "I see myself in continuity with my predecessors," he says. Nevertheless, he has his own ideas. "I would like to place even more emphasis on vocal music. We also have Cardinal Complex, an early music formation at the festival - this area is also very important to me." Only when asked does he reveal that he has greatly improved the acoustics in the Hotel Schweizerhof with an electro-acoustic system from Müller BBM, which he controls himself on a tablet.

The Davos Festival is also a music festival of special places. The mountain railroad takes you up to 1861 meters to the Hotel Schatzalp. In front of the Art Nouveau façade in the early evening, a wind quintet put together for the festival plays Samuel Barber's three-part concert evening "Supersensual" with "culinary intermezzi" Summer Music to quiche and Prosecco before the audience moves into the feudal interior, fortified by Graubünden barley soup, in Marin Marais Le tableau de l'operation de la taille musically witness a gall bladder removal. Marco Amherd reads out the decisive steps of the operation in French (harpsichord: Matías Lanz). When the scalpel is used, the pain can be heard in the highest notes of the viola da gamba (Alex Jellici). Gradually, the sun goes down and it gets darker in the hall. The table lamps create a living room atmosphere. Anton Spronk models on the cello Al fresco by composer in residence Gerald Resch. And Amanda Taurina (oboe), Marie Boichard (bassoon) and Frederic Bager (piano) delight with a nimble, lively version of Francis Poulenc's trio. The grandiose musical finale is rounded off with a regional Röteli, the fine Grisons cherry liqueur. Afterwards, the Schatzalpbahn takes visitors back to the hotel late at night, musically fulfilled and culinary satisfied.

A Zurich gallery owner donated a Bible to the museum, which the atheist Wagner acquired in 1870 from "Franz Josef Schiffmann's Buchhandlung und Antiquariat in Luzern", as the cover reveals. Wagner had lived in Lucerne since 1866, in the Tribschen country house on the lake. His mistress Cosima von Bülow gave him his third illegitimate child in 1869. This son was to bear the name "Wagner". However, this was only possible through the marriage of his parents.

On August 25, 1870, 150 years ago, the wedding of Cosima and Richard Wagner took place in the reformed parish of St. Matthew's Church. Pastor Johann Heinrich Tschudi performed the marriage ceremony. Cosima had previously divorced her husband Hans von Bülow and, as a Catholic, had to convert to Protestantism. She took this upon herself for the sake of her son. Pastor Tschudi was cooperative and allowed the child to be baptized and registered on 4 September 1870, after a delay of over a year, and thus recognized as Wagner's son.
 

A participatory development process for the 2021-2024 package of measures began in August 2019. An initial draft was discussed publicly with stakeholders and interested parties at the 4th Bern Culture Forum in February 2020. Based on the feedback, the departments concerned planned to revise the package of measures and submit it to the municipal council for approval in summer 2020.

Just ten days after the cultural forum, the first cultural events had to be canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the city writes. The lockdown followed shortly afterwards. It will probably not be possible to resume normal operations for some time yet. As a result, the situation for cultural professionals and cultural institutions is currently uncertain and difficult.

For this reason, the Executive Board has decided to review the 2021-2024 package of measures. Kultur Stadt Bern will hold talks with cultural professionals, event organizers and other stakeholder groups by the end of 2020.
 

After Beethoven had completed work on three symphonies between 1806 and 1808, there was another comparable surge of symphonic works and sketches in 1812. Whether and in what way this was related to Napoleon's Russian campaign, which kept the whole of political Europe in suspense, cannot be conclusively clarified. Nevertheless, it is striking that - as with the Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6, which were composed at almost the same time - sharply contrasting aesthetic and musical ideas are in direct proximity to one another. At the end of May, Beethoven even noted in a letter to the publishers Breitkopf & Härtel that he "writing 3 new symphonies, one of which is already finished"and meant the Symphony No. 7 in A major op. 92, the Symphony No. 8 in F major op. 93, but probably also the very first sketches for the later Symphony No. 9 in D minor op. 125.

The 8th Symphony was first performed in public on February 27, 1814 in the Great Redoutensaal, barely three months after the spectacular premiere of the 7th Symphony, which "Connoisseurs and non-connoisseurs alike" and was celebrated almost triumphantly. However, unlike its sister work, the Eighth - completely unexpectedly for the tense auditorium - made a big impression. "no furore"how the General musical newspaper noted. Beethoven defiantly commented on this remark with "precisely because it is much better". This is how Carl Czerny handed it down. Nevertheless, Eduard Hanslick (Vienna's musical memory and conscience, as it were) reported decades later that until around 1850, the Pastoral (No. 6) was usually meant when people spoke of the F major Symphony - as if Beethoven had never written a second work in this key.

The Eighth Symphony was obviously misunderstood early on as a (too) lightly constructed counterpart to the Seventh, whereby the metronomically ticking second movement and the metrically shifted, old-fashioned Tempo di Menuetto were often interpreted as humorous; the first movement and the finale were strangely less impressive. In all the movements of the symphony, Beethoven is not so much concerned with striking musical humor as with playing with the listener's expectations, who is repeatedly misled or surprised in a highly witty manner: with sudden dynamic outbursts, shifts in accent or irregularities in the shaping of the periods. The symphony also manages without a slow introduction. With the first note, Beethoven immediately jumps into the Allegro vivace e con brio and into 3/4 time, which is unusual for a first movement ...

P.S. In the popular canon on the "love Mälzel" and its metronome (WoO 162) is a forgery planted by Anton Schindler.
 

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With the #SolidarityForMusic campaign, Lucerne Festival, together with its main sponsors, is taking the initiative to draw attention to the plight of freelance musicians and to help.

The large-scale charity campaign will run for 16 days. Each participant can film themselves or others interpreting Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". This can involve singing, drumming, clapping or rapping. The video will then be uploaded to the campaign website, where you can already discover video statements and contributions from well-known Swiss musicians and musicians living in Switzerland.

If you don't want to make music, you can also simply donate money on the website. At the end of the project, all partner contributions and monetary donations collected via the campaign website will be sent to Sonart, the Swiss Association of Music Professionals.

More info: www.solidarityformusic.ch

The state contribution of CHF 54.5 million for the years 2021 to 2024 is intended to ensure that the academy can continue and expand its services over the next four years. According to the Canton of Basel-Stadt, it is particularly important to respond to the rising number of children and pupils in the canton and the associated increase in demand for basic musical education.

The Musik-Akademie Basel operates the music school of the Musik-Akademie Basel as a foundation under private law. The School of Music, which is also located on the Musik-Akademie campus and includes the Classical Music, Jazz and Schola Cantorum Basiliensis institutes, is fully part of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) and is financed via the global contribution to the FHNW.

In 1770, the young engraver and clarinettist Bernhard Schott founded a publishing house in Mainz, where the company headquarters are still located today in a listed classicist building dating from 1792. The 19th century saw the first heyday of B. Schott's sons, when the 9th Symphony and the Missa solemnis important late works by Beethoven could be published. In the second half of the century, the collaboration with Richard Wagner was formative - and costly due to the enormous financial investment in his stage works Die Meistersinger, The Ring of the Nibelung and Parsifal.

"The thicker the workers, the thinner the stretcher becomes."

Early caricature by Willy Strecker on Richard Wagner's immense advance payment and fee claims against Ludwig Strecker senior

Franz Schott, the grandson of the company founder, died in 1874. He bequeathed a share of the publishing house to Ludwig Strecker, who joined the company as a trainee and later took over the management. With Peter Hanser-Strecker as managing partner, Schott Music is still a family business today. It is one of the leading music and media publishers for classical and contemporary music and brings together more than twenty music publishers under its roof. Around 150 people are employed internationally in the editorial, production and distribution departments.

The program includes performance and teaching literature, Urtext editions, teaching methods, six specialist journals, choral music and jazz, study scores, complete editions, music books and CDs, supplemented by digital products such as music apps, e-books and e-scores. Schott also lends out performance material for almost 10,000 concert and stage works worldwide.

The publishing history in stages
Short texts, pictures and musical examples arranged around a timeline invite you on a journey through time, allowing you to follow the musical, cultural and social development of the publishing house over a quarter of a millennium.
www.250-joy-of-music.com

Niggi Messerli has been the face of the Palazzo cultural center in Liestal since the very beginning, writes the canton. He is receiving the prize for his life's work. Forty years ago, he and three friends developed a concept for an autonomous, self-managed cultural venue and founded Kulturhaus Palazzo AG in the old post office building in Liestal.

When he and his companions opened "das Palazzo" in 1979, there was no boom in off-spaces. But there was an urge for self-managed space beyond institutional accreditation. This meant that alternative culture had arrived in the Basel region. Since then, the house has been inviting visitors to take a cultural detour at the interface between the Upper Basel region and the urban agglomeration.

At the same time as the 40th anniversary, there is a change of management and founder Niggi Messerli hands over his building to new hands, who will continue to develop it. Today, the Palazzo is home to an art gallery, the Sputnik cinema and a small theater; it also houses a bookshop, an Indian restaurant, advice centers, studios and a small mosque.
 

The search for original repertoire is time-consuming. With his Aurio music publishing house, composer and pianist Sebastian Gabriel relieves musicians of this research and provides them with pieces in ready-to-play editions. The publishing house offers works by unknown composers and rarely performed pieces by well-known composers by subscription or individually. Carefully edited editions of sheet music are published four times a year, in fine print or digitally as PDFs and enriched with explanations and audio recordings for orientation. Each edition contains five to six works of varying degrees of difficulty, including chamber music with arranged parts.

The first editions from April 2020 offer musical discoveries for flute, piano and clarinet; editions for violin, cello and classical guitar will follow. The range is aimed at amateur musicians, music teachers, music students and professional musicians.

Renowned artists curate one work for each issue. For example, Yaara Tal recommends Fantesia a piano piece by Ferdinand Kauer, a little-known composer of the Viennese classical period, Michael Korstick rediscovers a work by Peter I. Tchaikovsky and flautist Kathrin Christians has selected pieces by Louise Farrenc, Carl Wilhelm August Blum and Claude Debussy for the edition for which she is responsible. The repertoire ranges from baroque to contemporary works, with some curators also presenting their own arrangements.

The editions are designed for practicing, teaching and performing. They are printed on a natural paper inspired by Japanese paper clothing. The special binding of the editions ensures that the sheet music remains open on the music stand. The digital edition comes as a PDF and can be accessed on all end devices. The editions are published in two languages, German and English, and can be subscribed to worldwide.

www.aurio-verlag.de
 

"Deh vieni alla finestra" (Feinsliebchen, come to the window). With these words from Mozart's Don Giovanni the mandolin still comes into play on the opera stage today and reveals something about its origins in Italian folk music. But it was not only this wonderful canzonetta that contributed to its spread. Around the turn of the 19th century, the Neapolitan mandolin tuned in fifths was just as popular in Paris as it was in Vienna or Prague. Johann Nepomuk Hummel, for example, wrote several full-fledged compositions, and in 1798 the instrument can be found in Leopold Kozeluch's curiously scored Sinfonia concertante for piano, mandolin, trumpet, double bass and orchestra. Beethoven's œuvre also features four short movements, including two "sonatinas", as he called them, although each of these is only a single movement.

These petitessen, probably the most balanced in sound to be accompanied on a fortepiano, were composed during Beethoven's stay in Prague between February and April 1796 as a commission or favor for Countess Josephine von Clary-Aldringen. However, all four individual pieces (a possible fifth is lost) fell into oblivion just as quickly as the mandolin itself - at least in music for the concert hall or salon. It was not until the 1920s that the instrument flourished again. Incidentally, it was also used by Arnold Schönberg, both in the dodecaphonic Serenade op. 24 (1920/24) as well as in the arrangement of Luigi Denza's Funiculi, funicula (1921). Beethoven's pieces first appeared in print between 1880 and 1940.

A look at the autograph of the Adagio in C minor WoO 43a, known as the "Sonatina", proves that Beethoven obviously had to take limited technical skills into consideration. It is now kept in the British Library and is bound into the so-called Kafka sketchbook: as the crossed-out 16th-note runs in the mandolin part show, the A section of the piece was not originally intended to be repeated verbatim, but varied in a more sophisticated way.

Manuscript Page 87 recto / Page 87 verso
 

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Born in Geneva in 1935, René Zosso is considered a pioneer in the rediscovery of the hurdy-gurdy. He gave his first concerts with the instrument in 1962 and was less interested in the hurdy-gurdy's original repertoire than in its general tonal possibilities. In the 1960s and 1970s, he therefore worked with the founder of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer, as well as with medieval ensembles. 

He collaborated with the Austrian René Clemencic, another specialist in medieval music. He enriched his research into early music thanks to his knowledge of the prosody of French, Latin and old Mediterranean dialects. Around the turn of the millennium, he also participated in numerous projects by Jordi Savall.

A Nefera is "a fighter in a musical field that is still rarely played by women" and doesn't just make very good hip-hop that gets you moving, makes you dance along and has a lasting effect, writes the canton. With her strong Spanish lyrics, her insistent voice and her unmistakable demands, she also stands for all those women who are afraid to speak out.

La Nefera (www.lanefera.ch) was born in the Dominican Republic and came to the canton of Basel-Landschaft at the age of ten. She studied social work and has been involved in Swiss hip-hop as a rapper and bandleader since 2008. She released her first solo album in 2016 and won the Audience Award of the Basel Pop Prize in 2018.

The current discussion draft of the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection supplements the draft of the First Act on the Adaptation of Copyright Law to the Requirements of the Digital Single Market of 15 January 2020 with regard to the implementation of the directive and includes, among other things, regulations on the responsibility of upload platforms and collective licenses.

According to Susann Eichstädt, Deputy Secretary General of the German Music Council, the draft is a step towards an urgently needed, fair balance of interests between all stakeholders involved. It marks the right path, but quick action is necessary if the deadline for implementing the EU directive is to be met in view of the challenges posed by the coronavirus crisis and the upcoming federal elections.

The German Music Council and many of its members have participated in the consultation process of the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection. The statement of the German Music Council can be found here.
 

"Another word about folk songs. They are truly what the true artist, who begins to recognize the errors of his art, pays attention to like a sailor to the North Star, and from where he observes most for his profit. Only such melodies as the Swiss song are true original folk melodies, and they stir and move the whole sentient world, they are true Orpheus songs." Perhaps it was a coincidence that Beethoven became aware of these words by Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752-1814) while still in Bonn around 1790 - printed in the preface to the small collection Happy songs for German men (1781) and supplemented by an eleven-bar melody with the following text underlay: "A boy has a daughter, her name is Babeli, she has a few pigtails, they are like gold, that's why he likes the dusle sic! hold." In view of this rendition of Schwyzerdütsch, which can only be understood on the surface, we can probably be glad that we are spared the other ten verses of the song in this source. In any case, the song about Babeli and Dursli, like so many folk songs, tells the story of a tragic love that ultimately drives the young man into mercenary service.

All this remained hidden from Beethoven. The irregular structure (3+3+2+3 bars) and the seemingly archaic melody alone could therefore have inspired him to develop it artistically. He first added a simple bass line to the melody and then added six easily realizable variations. The work is still taught in piano lessons today. However, the scoring of the first edition published by Simrock in Bonn in 1798 seems strange: "Clavecin, ou Harpe". While the reference to the harpsichord was still quite common (the process of renewal towards the emerging fortepiano was taking place gradually), the mention of a harp as an alternative is surprising. In 1796, Beethoven himself provided a clue to clarification in a letter to the piano maker Johann Andreas Streicher (1761-1833). After hearing the young Augsburg native Elisabeth von Kissow (1784-1868) play on a fortepiano, he wrote: "It is certain that the way of playing the Klawier is still the most uncultivated of all instruments so far, one often believes to hear only a harp, and I prefer to be happy that you are one of the few who realize and feel that one can also sing on the Klawiern as soon as you can only feeln, I hope the time will come when the harp and the klawier will be two completely different instruments." The scoring inserted by the publisher thus seems to correspond to a performance practice that was still quite common at this time.
 

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