The widely traveled Czech violinist František Drdla (1868-1944), a theory student of Anton Bruckner at the Vienna Conservatory, wrote over 200 works of light music: in addition to two operettas and a violin concerto, many genre pieces for violin and piano. One of the best known, this melting, harmonically charming little tome, has now also been gratefully arranged for viola. It is as good on the viola in the same key as on the violin.

Franz Drdla: Souvenir, for viola and piano arranged by Heinz Bethmann, score and viola part, BU 8194, € 11.00, Musikverlag Bruno Uetz, Halberstadt 2019

His third collaboration with US pianist Marc Copland is also his most mature, bassist Daniel Schläppi says in the documentation for their joint CD Alice's Wonderland know. And duo partner Copland is also full of praise: "Playing with Daniel reminds me of the things I love most about playing jazz: the warmth, the communication and the attempt to share an experience with the listener."

The present work is not least intended to document how the music of the two has developed. Marc Copland (*1948), who has also performed on stage with jazz luminaries such as John Abercrombie and Ralph Towner, once again proves himself to be a master of the chordal and knows how to elicit an ethereal fluid from his piano with a fine touch. Meanwhile, his partner, Daniel Schläppi, 20 years his junior, stands out as a curious bassist with a penchant for groovy sounds. - He also runs a label and is an associated researcher at the Historical Institute of the University of Bern.

The 49-minute, nine-song encounter between the duo on Alice's Wonderland begins with a cover of Cole Porter's Everything I Love. The version by Schläppi and Copland is well-tempered, draws on a broad palette of timbres and is full of emotional power. Although the piece turns out to be stylistically trend-setting for the rest of the album, the two musicians always manage to surprise with their intimate, light playing, improvisation and superb timing. This is also the case on Blue In Greenwhich originates from the Miles Davis songbook. Conclusion: The elegant collaboration between Schläppi & Copland knows how to inspire - from A to Z.
 

Swiss flautist Ursula Büttiker already attracted attention with her first CD releases. The last student of André Jaunet, she also took singing lessons. So it is no wonder that her flute playing is primarily aimed at expressive cantabile.

The musician champions little-known works with the passion of a discoverer striving for counter-positions. Made the CD Musical Postcards with rarities by Pál Járdányi or Bryan Kelly, the follow-up production, all works for solo flute, stood out with works by Jindřich Feld and Saverio Mercadante.

The CD produced to mark the 150th anniversary of Hector Berlioz's death is entirely in the French tradition shaped by the flute maker and composer Theobald Boehm Élégie - Rêverie - Caprice with pianist Minako Matsuura playing along with a keen ear. At the center is Jules Mouquet, a Rome Prize winner inspired by Greek mythology. In his La Flûte de Pan In her sonata from 1906, impressionistic moods alternate with brilliance and virtuosity in a classical manner just as frequently as the dynamic contrasts. Although she manages with a minimum of vibrato, Ursula Büttiker develops impressive expressivity even in very low registers. Her bravura breathing technique benefits strongly chromaticized runs; the pianist's delicate touch enhances the sound magic of the many delicate echo effects.

Typical French elegance fills both the Cinq Pièces brèves from Mouquet, Chanson et Badinerie by Pierre Camus as well as the Élégie op. 47 by Theobald Boehm and the music crowned by a tarantella Three musical sketches by Wilhelm Bernhard Molique, who shares the same year of death as Berlioz. In Rêverie et Caprice op. 8, Berlioz's only concertante work, thanks to the subtle arrangement for flute and piano by Hans-Wolfgang Riedel, it is impossible to tell that it was originally set for violin and orchestra and is based on sketches for Teresa's cavatina from the opera Benvenuto Cellini based.
 

The award also includes a two-year engagement as Assistant Conductor in Hallé and the position of Musical Director of the Hallé Youth Orchestra.

In 2019, Lazarova won the first conducting competition of the National Radio of Albania and the James Conlon Conducting Prize of the Aspen Music Festival. She is currently studying for a master's degree in conducting with Johannes Schläfli at the ZHdK (Zurich University of the Arts). She has already completed a master's degree in violin at Indiana University (USA), where she graduated with honors.

Her current engagements include conducting the Hungarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Albanian Radio Television Symphony Orchestra and the Italian Solisti Aquilani. Her ZHdK studies also include a debut with Carmen at the Meiningen State Theater in Germany.

There are probably no more than a dozen compositions of classical music that have found a permanent place in the public consciousness. The reasons for this are extremely varied; they range from their frequent use on official occasions, in radio, film and television to sometimes not-so-local traditions. Hand on heart: who hasn't heard a more or less festive performance of Beethoven's Ninth on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, at the end of which the singing seems to eclipse everything symphonic? At least in this sublime moment, it is as if - despite many everyday experiences - all people really are brothers. Moreover, this "Ode to Joy" has never been a bad substitute when no national anthem was available or would fit (for example in Rhodesia, in Kosovo or at the former entry of all-German teams at the Olympic Games). In all these cases, however, Friedrich Schiller's visionary verses were not sung, perhaps not even considered. The same applies (unfortunately) to its official use as the European anthem (since 1985). wordless arranged by Herbert von Karajan in the versions for piano, wind orchestra or orchestra.

There was no shortage of arrangements in the 19th century. Even then, the crucial question was how to deal with the text and the vocal parts. Franz Liszt's virtuoso transcription for piano two hands (1853), for example, became a piano reduction in the finale. Years earlier, Carl Czerny had already had reservations about such a performance when he made his own arrangement for piano four hands: Where should the vocal parts have been inserted, since (as is still customary today) the two players are assigned the left and right pages of the open edition respectively? And so the Leipzig publisher Probst finally published a piano volume in landscape format, while the vocal parts were enclosed separately in portrait format. In a letter dated September 3, 1828, Czerny had expressed himself even more pragmatically (and as we know today: with almost clairvoyant abilities): "The future will appreciate the greatness of musical composition so much that it will forget the words."

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Link to the project homepage "52 x Beethoven"

From the 2020/21 academic year, Gebert will join the Zurich Violin College with Ilya Gringolts, Andreas Janke, Rudolf Koelman, Sergey Malov and Alexander Sitkovetski. The Polish-Finnish violinist completed her studies at music academies in Europe and the USA. She is just as much in demand internationally as a teacher as she is as a musician in renowned orchestras and at numerous festivals. Her profound knowledge of historical performance practice and contemporary music enriches the ZHdK's existing expertise.

Irish-born singer and songwriter Shirley Grimes has been contributing to the cultural life of the Bern region for decades. She has contributed her musical versatility to various bands, but has also realized many of her own projects.

Over the past twelve years, Bernese violinist Meret Lüthi has built up the Bernese early music orchestra "Les Passions de l'Ame" and positioned it on the international music scene. She has discovered and publicly performed or recorded numerous baroque works.

Since 1992, the Bürgi-Willert Foundation has awarded a cultural prize every two years. It is awarded to people who have enriched Bern's cultural life for many years.

The 1913 statutes of the Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft, founded in the same year, already provided for the possibility of appointing honorary members. The first use was made of this in 1937, when Felix Stransky, financial officer and member of the management of the Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft, was appointed the first honorary member, the second being Richard Strauss in 1938.

The Moldovan-born violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja initially studied violin with Michaela Schlögl, a student of David Oistrakh. In 1989, her family emigrated to Vienna, where she continued her studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. At the age of 21, she moved to the conservatory in Bern on a scholarship. She graduated there with distinction in 2000.

After serving as Artistic Partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in the USA from 2014 to 2018, she took over the artistic direction of Camerata Bern at the end of 2018, with whom she has since staged the projects "War and Chips" and "Time and Eternity".

Those who want to deepen their knowledge of contemporary music in Bern benefit from transdisciplinarity: studio, live electronics, composition and creative practice, ensembles, sound arts, theater, visual arts, literature, performance, festivals - all connections are possible and are supported by an international team of lecturers and an individual study plan.

From 2020, the HKB's Master Specialized Music Performance course in New Music / Création musicale will be part of an exclusive European institutional network: the international cooperation Master New Music Bern-Dresden-Salzburg. HKB students will also visit one of the other two universities of their choice, develop and realize projects and take them on tour.

The ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra was due to tour South Korea and China from March 10 to 21, but the tour under Finnish conductor John Storgards has now been completely canceled. The reason for this is the spread of the coronavirus in China, which is now also affecting cultural life in South Korea.

Initially, the two concerts planned in China were canceled by the organizer at the beginning of February, and a week later one of the organizers also withdrew from Korea. The remaining concerts in Korea can now no longer be performed by the orchestra.

Due to the wave of infections, a long-planned concert tour by Festival Strings Lucerne with Midori, which was to have toured several East Asian countries in March, has also had to be canceled. A shortened tour without the concerts planned in mainland China was also no longer an option due to stricter travel regulations and the shutdown of public life at planned tour venues such as Hong Kong. The canceled concerts are to be rescheduled as soon as possible.

Concerts were planned in Singapore and Seoul as well as in the Chinese cities of Shanghai, Changsha and Zhuhai and a performance at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, where the Festival Strings Lucerne has been a guest performer since 1978. The Hong Kong Arts Festival, one of the most renowned festivals in Asia, was even completely canceled this year with over 120 events. A unique occurrence in the festival's almost 50-year history.

Born into an aristocratic family in 1905 and raised at Valva Castle near Naples, he bears the title Conte d'Ayala Valva. "Even as a three-year-old, he used to spend hours improvising on the piano with his feet, arms and elbows and did not want to be disturbed under any circumstances," says pianist Marianne Schroeder, who knew Scelsi personally and worked with him.

As a pianist, he was largely self-taught. He later studied composition with three teachers, with Debussy specialist Giacinto Sallustio in Rome, with Egon Köhler, a Scriabin supporter, in Geneva and twelve-tone technique with Schoenberg pupil Walter Klein in Vienna. These studies took place outside the academic world, from which he deliberately kept his distance and was therefore sometimes despised or ridiculed. Marianne Schroeder enthusiastically recounts a 1979 concert in the Hans-Huber-Saal in Basel, in which Jürg Wittenbach performed works by Scelsi. The Japanese soprano and Scelsi specialist Michiko Hirayama was also there. In 2014, Schroeder invited the now 90-year-old singer to her first Scelsi festival at the Gare du Nord. "It was incredible: she sang a one-and-a-half-hour program with the Canti del Capricornothat were dedicated to her."

During the Second World War, Scelsi struggled with nervous problems and became increasingly interested in spiritualism, turning to Far Eastern teachings and practising yoga intensively. He believed that he received his music as messages from the beyond, for example from Hindu deities: "I am only a medium in the service of something much greater than myself," he says in the film portrait The first movement of the unmoved from the year 2018.

He was in search of microtonalities, always looking for frictions, minor seconds and sevenths. In 1965, he stopped improvising on the piano and began working with the Ondiola, the first electronic instrument on which pitches could be set.

Marianne Schroeder, a piano teacher at the Basel Music School at the beginning of her career, states: "I only felt happy when I started playing modern music. I was always successful with it". She studied Bartók, Stockhausen, Feldman and Cage. "Scelsi was a logical consequence of this," she is convinced. After the initial experience of the Scelsi concert in Basel, it took another five years before she plucked up the courage to call the master: "In 1984, I was in Darmstadt when it came like a bolt of lightning: now I have to play Scelsi." The following year, she met the master in Rome. He asked three questions: "How old are you? What kind of music do you play? Do you do yoga?" She didn't do yoga, but started soon after Scelsi's death (1988) and still practises it intensively today: "Scelsi was extremely kind and calm, someone who only wanted the best for you." As he always worked at night, you could only meet him after 4 pm. Scelsi often asked: "Did you improvise today?" It was extremely important to him that a musician should let the music emerge from within.

You couldn't listen to his music for more than ten minutes at a time, Scelsi said, it was too eruptive. Today we've moved on, says Schroeder: "There's something emotionally right about Scelsi. There is something natural, fundamental and unaffected about it."
 

After a concert in Rome, Schroeder had her second important inspiration: "Now I'm going to do a festival." She found a project manager in Anja Wernicke, and the first three-day edition was successfully staged in January 2014. With the exception of 2015, the festival has always been hosted by Gare du Nord. However, the first day traditionally takes place at Fachwerk Allschwil, as was the case this year on February 2. First on the program was a singing workshop with Amit Sharma, followed by a reading from Scelsi's autobiographical work, Il sogno 101. The music was entirely dedicated to the piano. The following were performed Cinque incantesimi (1953), performed by Marija Skender. These pieces are among the composer's best-known piano works. They were written over several years in nightly improvisations that were recorded on tape. Action Music 1-4 (1955), interpreted by Giusy Caruso, dates from the time when Scelsi was inspired by the action painting of Jackson Pollock, among others, in New York. Marianne Schroeder set the final point with I Capricci di TY, Suite No. 6 (1938-39), which are intended to describe the caprices of his wife Dorothy.

From 7 to 9 May, three more festival days are planned in Allschwil (the Gare du Nord is not available this time for organizational reasons). A masterclass entitled "The Art of Scelsi Singing" with the soprano and student of Michiko Hirayama, Maki Ota, has been confirmed. Marianne Schroeder is bubbling over with enthusiasm and program ideas, but also regrets that she can only make short-term plans at the moment due to her work overload: "A dream would be Scelsi's monumental early works La nascita del verbo with orchestra and choir, but that takes at least two years of preparation."
 

Dodo Hug initially appeared on stage with Christoph Marthaler & Pepe Solbach, among others, and later founded her ensemble Mad Dodo. Since 1994 she has been working together with the Sardinian musician and cantautore Efisio Contini, who is also her life partner. She has been a Swiss/Italian dual citizen since 2004.

This year's two sponsorship awards of CHF 30,000 each go to the Bla*sh network and the musician duo Eclecta. Bla*sh - short for Black She - is a network of Black women cultural mediators and artists in German-speaking Switzerland that was founded in Zurich in 2013. The network is committed to the empowerment of black women in a society in which whiteness and masculinity are still considered the norm.

Eclecta stands for a decidedly eclectic, electrifying musical firework display. The musicians Andrina Bollinger (*1991) and Marena Whitcher (*1990) are responsible for this. They sing, rattle, scream and whisper their way into the music. Even broken glockenspiels, defective pianos, balloons or punched papers find their way into the songs. The musicians studied jazz in Zurich and began to shed their musical blinkers early on in their own formations.

The Vorarlberg State Conservatory hosted a symposium for cultural and music professionals on February 4 and 5. The topic of "Music and Society" brought together around 170 participants from the four-country region in the Montforthaus Feldkirch together. In addition to presentations and inputs, there were lively debates in discussion rounds and the first-ever format was used to exchange ideas.

Martin Tröndle (Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen) laid the foundation for the subsequent debates with his report on "non-visitor research": cultural institutions (in the narrower sense of theaters, opera houses and classical concert halls) are known as places where only a small part of society can be found. However, it is still quite unclear who misses out on the many offerings of the classical sector and, above all, for what reasons. A few findings from a study (conducted in Berlin in 2019 with around 1,300 young academics) are briefly mentioned here: the classic feature pages are hardly used as a place for information and preparation, while offline information and friends are the second most important source after the internet.

Lack of time and money are often cited as reasons for not attending traditional events; however, they are not decisive for visitor behavior. Tröndle speaks of 11 % of so-called "never-visitors" who are hopeless to try to attract; it is more worthwhile because it is more promising to get to know the 20 or so % of "not-yet" and "maybe-visitors". Institutions can ask themselves how they can offer "proximity" on all possible levels and how they can make their establishment and their offerings inviting for all those who want culture.

The Blaibach concert hall in the Bavarian Forest, a local project that has become known beyond the region, was largely financed by urban development programs. The well-known problem of operating costs for programming also exists here, as is the case with many other organizers. In the meantime, public funding has been completely dispensed with here, as it is too insignificant compared to the effort required to obtain it. Artistic Director Thomas E. Bauer passionately argues that there is a right to prominent culture as well as to education and infrastructure - even in rural areas.

The concert series "Montforter Zwischentöne" seeks regional relevance by involving the local communities, playing in urban spaces and having an impact beyond Feldkirch into the Rhine Valley with its 250,000 inhabitants. In its own productions, themes from the region are taken up and artistically processed in new concert formats; participation here means taking "user competence" just as seriously as expertise.

Christine Rhomberg (Hilti Foundation) provided an example of practical talent promotion with her report on the commitment "Music for social change" and introduced the second major topic of the meeting: How can musicians be empowered to get involved in social contexts while still in training? Creative people and clever collaborations are needed to combine the established music business and socio-musical initiatives such as JeKi or Superar in a sustainable and profitable way.

It is an urgent task to bring music studies and teacher training closer together in order to close the devastating gaps in children's basic musical education. This was also made clear in the presentation by Peter Heiler from the Bregenz Music School: for a "music school in school", music teachers are needed who have the entire spectrum of "educate - learn - play" in mind, as there is less and less support from parents.

Many musical program points enriched the symposium, various ensembles of the Vorarlberg State Conservatory as well as the many-membered Superar Choir (conducted by Magdalena Fingerlos) performed. The final round of the Hugo Competition - an international student competition for new concert formats organized by Montforter Zwischentöne - presented four teams from German-speaking music academies with ideas on the theme of "Taking detours". The XYlit collective from Leipzig won over the jury and audience with their entry "Traumlandschaft"; the Hugo winners received 1000 euros in prize money and can now develop their project with a professional production budget for the Montforter Zwischentöne summer festival.

The symposium was a successful prelude to further exchange between music and society and was cleverly placed: The Landeskonservatorium has just applied for accreditation as a music university. For the artistic director, Jörg Maria Ortwein, his institution and the symposium are equally important as "a source of inspiration for innovative approaches. The aim is to establish the emerging private music university as an ideal platform for the development of artistic personalities with a multi-layered impact on society."

Photo: Vorarlberg State Conservatory/Victor Marin

For Jörg Maria Ortwein, Artistic Director of the State Conservatory, networking and innovative communication approaches are important.

No, Beethoven as a person does not appear in this opera. His music is also only quoted recognizably once, when towards the end, like a commentary from offstage, the vocal quartet Mir ist so wunderbar from Fidelio can be heard. But the focus is on Beethoven's daughter, and her name is Minona. How could anyone who is even halfway informed about music history think that there is no mention of Beethoven's paternity anywhere in scholarship?

But it is certainly possible. At least that is the thesis of Jüri Reinvere, author of the opera Minonawhich has now been premiered in Regensburg, Bavaria, at the start of the so-called Beethoven Year. The composer, who was born in Estonia in 1971 and has lived in Frankfurt am Main for several years, carried out meticulous research before writing the libretto in order to substantiate his assumption and thus the plot of his opera. Among other things, he found documents in his home town of Tallinn that provide a deep insight into Minona's family history.

The pivotal point of the story is the mysterious person to whom Beethoven dedicated his song cycle To the distant beloved of 1816 and who is presumably identical to the "immortal beloved" to whom he addressed a letter in 1812 after a short stay in Prague, but never sent it.

Reinvere suspects that this figure, whose anonymity Beethoven carefully guarded, was the Hungarian Countess Josephine von Brunsvik, married to von Stackelberg; she was Beethoven's piano pupil and he was demonstrably strongly attracted to her. In those July days of 1812, when Beethoven was in Prague, he is said to have met her secretly, according to Reinvere's theory, and that is when it is said to have happened. But there is only circumstantial evidence, no proof that Josephine was in Prague at the time. But there was another woman who was also very close to Beethoven: Antonie Brentano. The biographical fog will probably never be completely cleared.

Historical research is one thing, artistic freedom is another. Reinvere, who skillfully balances reality and fiction, has stuck to the Brunsvik variant and turned it into a libretto that is eminently suitable for opera: the possible meeting between Beethoven and Josephine in Prague has consequences, and they go by the name of Minona.

In fact - and this is where reality comes into play again - the girl was born exactly nine months after the ominous Prague date and baptized Minona von Stackelberg. However, Josephine and her husband Baron von Stackelberg were already divorced in July 1812 and living separately - honi soit qui mal y pense. In the opera, Countess von Goltz, whom the distraught Josephine tells of her unseemly misstep, recommends the well-known recipe: off to Vienna, to the cold marriage bed! A child from this amorous loner Beethoven would be social ruin.

This prequel is told in the first two scenes of the opera. The rest of the two-act opera describes the life of the real Minona. She now becomes the main character of the opera. We see her as a young girl and as an old woman, sometimes both in simultaneous scenes. She is a so-called difficult character; like a female Kaspar Hauser, she is on a lifelong search for her identity, a tragic figure caught between two fathers. One, the fighter for high ideals, to whom she inexplicably feels instinctively drawn, is only present in her genes and her subconscious. The other, a Protestant fanatic and tyrannical educator, dominates her real existence with physical and psychological violence. She perishes between these two poles.

Towards the end, Beethoven's love letters to her mother Josephine are handed to her as heiress. She now feels that her suspicions have been confirmed and knows who she is. The figure of Leonore appears, an allegory of ideal love, and a philosophical dialog about the true nature of love ensues. Minona realizes that her feelings have atrophied under the pressure of her pious upbringing and that she has never lived her life: "I never existed ... I don't know where I come from, I don't know who wanted me." Minona, read backwards, means "anonymous". What remains is hopelessness and emptiness. Slightly dazed, you sneak out of the theater.

The two-act play, which is somewhere between a stationary drama and a witty conversation piece, artfully interweaves times and settings. The extensive dialog parts are worked out with great care; an arioso tone, which does not impair the comprehensibility of the words, prevails. The singing is carried by the powerful, flowing orchestral sound. It shines in rich colors, never seems ponderous and surprisingly never drowns out the singing voices, but rather carries them. Several orchestral commentaries provide expressive climaxes, and the one at the beginning of the last scene adds an apocalyptic dimension to the increasingly darkening events. The final section drags on, but overall the musical design provides internal tension both in terms of architecture and detail.

The production was not without its weaknesses. This was not due to Marc Weeger's stage. With a metal frame that cleverly structured the space and the revolving stage mechanism, he created the conditions for quick scene changes and expressive decorations. Director Hendrik Müller, however, believed he had to spruce up the play with all sorts of far-fetched ingredients. At the beginning, the Reich piano grandmother Elly Ney ghosts through the scene with solemn gestures, which immediately places Beethoven's music under Nazi suspicion - a popular means of progressive cultural criticism today.

In the Stackelberg picture, the bigoted Protestant milieu is helped along with a little exorcism, and Beethoven's character of Leonore appears at the end as a malicious doctor in a white coat who gives Minona suicide pills and quickly shoots the thieving servants as she passes by. With silencer pistols, of course, just like the Mafiosi. Creative self-realization in honour, but please on the experimental stage and not at the premiere of a full-length opera, where it would be important to first make the outline of the work clear and not to deconstruct it straight away.