Her soprano is unmistakable, clear as a bell and slender and soars effortlessly to any height: a vocal jewel. Regula Mühlemann's interpretations in opera, mass and lieder are characterized by flawless technique and a high level of musicality. What is also particularly impressive about the Swiss soprano is the foresight with which she pursues her career. The naturalness of her appearance is transferred to her voice in a unique way, and she does not allow herself to be pushed into spheres that could harm her voice.

The songs of the homeland published by Sony stand for the unconventionality of this path: who has heard of Baumgartner, Langer, Flury or Roesgen-Champion, whose songs she presents here in excerpts. Five languages are used - High German, dialect, Italian, French and Romansh - all with perfect diction. The composition and sequence of the songs on offer is cleverly balanced, ranging from Guggisberg song to the teasing La pastorella dell'Alpi by Rossini.

The care she devotes to Swiss songs is particularly impressive. The selection also shows the support of "archive master" Walter Labhart, who opened up his immense collection to Mühlemann. There is much to discover: Wilhelm Baumgartner's The days of roses are still are ideally tailored to Mühlemann's youthful freshness; in Young girl in the mountains by Emil Frey, the accomplished opera singer flits past with her clever use of harmonic finesse.

The two impressionistic French songs by Marguerite Roesgen-Champion are a new facet that is increasingly becoming the focus of Mühlemann's work. We can still expect a lot from her in the French repertoire. While she unpacks a broad palette of expressive means in the Swiss songs, one is quietly disappointed by the Schubertian Shepherds on the rockwhich is somewhat lacking in liveliness due to its beautiful singing, which Daniel Ottensamer contributes on the clarinet. With Tatiana Korsunskaya, Mühlemann has an experienced, sensitive pianist at her side.

The soprano Letizia Scherrer studied in Feldkirch, Zurich, Tel Aviv and Basel and recently appeared at the Theater Chur as Cleopatra in Berlioz' lyrical scene La mort de Cléopâtre to be heard. In addition to her concert activities, she has also been a singing teacher at the Chur Music School for several years.

The 31-year-old Anna Erhard has made a name for herself as the frontwoman of the Basel pop-folk band Serafyn. She released her solo debut album in spring 2021. The 19-year-old drummer Momo Kawazoe is considered one of Switzerland's up-and-coming talents - on an instrument that is still rarely played by women in Switzerland.

Both the Chur recognition and sponsorship prizes are endowed with CHF 4,000 each. Every three years, in addition to the recognition and sponsorship prizes, the city can also award a cultural prize worth CHF 8,000, which honors significant and long-standing cultural work.

A particularly large number of music schools stated that registrations for singing lessons fell due to the pandemic (around 26%). Just under eleven percent, on the other hand, attributed the decline to a multi-year trend. Around half of the music schools recorded a decline in registrations for woodwind and brass instruments.

Although a third of music schools attributed this to a long-term trend, at least 14% see the pandemic as the reason for the decline in these two instrument groups. According to project manager Camp, singing in choirs and playing wind instruments were particularly affected by increased protective measures. Accordingly, possible risks of infection were often a topic in the media.

In order to gain a more precise picture of the impact on music schools as of the 2020/21 fall semester, the Swiss Music School Association (VMS) and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts surveyed 391 music schools that are members of the VMS. 219 music school directors from all over Switzerland provided information on the situation as part of the survey.

More info:
https://www.hslu.ch/de-ch/hochschule-luzern/ueber-uns/medien/medienmitteilungen/2021/06/24/netzbasierter-instrumental-und-vokalunterricht/

Discos and dance halls may reopen if access is restricted to people with a Covid certificate. As with all establishments whose access is restricted to people with a Covid certificate, the obligation to wear a mask does not apply.

For events where access is limited to people with a Covid certificate, there are no longer any restrictions, not even for large events. This means that events with more than 10,000 people can take place again from June 26 and the full capacity can be used. Among other things, a protection concept must specify how access is restricted to people with a certificate. Events with more than 1000 people require a cantonal permit.

For events without a Covid certificate, the following applies: If the audience is seated, a maximum of 1000 visitors can attend - both indoors and outdoors. Up to two-thirds of the venue's capacity can be used - both indoors and outdoors. However, events and concerts where visitors dance are still prohibited.

More info:
https://www.bak.admin.ch/bak/de/home/aktuelles/nsb-news.msg-id-84127.html

The study provides new figures on gender ratios in the performing arts, music, literature and visual arts, according to a press release from the Arts Council Pro Helvetia. The differences between the disciplines are pronounced, with the greatest need for action in the areas of music and visual arts.

Women are underrepresented in management positions. While 55 percent of women in the literature are employed at the management/director level, not a single woman can be found at this level in the music institutions surveyed. Women are also greatly outnumbered in artistic management positions and as authors of artistic works.

Only seven percent of concerts are conducted by women. Of the musical works performed, only two percent are by female composers.
Women also receive disproportionately few opportunities to perform in music: While the proportion of women at classical concerts is still 34 percent, it is only 9 to 12 percent in rock/pop and jazz live performances.

Link to the study:
https://genderstudies.philhist.unibas.ch/de/forschung/aktuelle-forschungsprojekte/geschlechterverhaeltnisse-im-schweizer-kulturbetrieb/

An example of the unconventional approach was the second concert, in which Friederike Heumann played works by Bach and his "sources" Dieterich Buxtehude and Johann Adam Reincken with her viola da gamba and the Stylus Phantasticus ensemble. And Alexander Melnikov presented various fortepianos by Anton Walter, Konrad Graf and Ignaz Pleyel for discussion under the motto "Grand Piano Worlds". The popular "Night of the Organs" was also a must, with graduates from Swiss and German music academies performing in Schaffhausen Minster and St. John's Church.

With Opium Burak Özdemir (*1983), one of the most creative minds in the field of early music, presented a cross-disciplinary project for the third time in Schaffhausen - a sound frenzy between baroque, new music and electroacoustics. The bassoonist and composer has been touring with his ensemble Musica Sequenza since 2008 and has made a name for himself internationally. He is at home in both the classical music scene and the electronic underground scene, and his vision is to break down the boundaries of space and time. His successful productions include The New Four Seasons, Silent Cantata and the sound installation series Transmute. His performances, for which he founded Musica Sequenza, have been shown worldwide at such renowned venues as the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Lincoln Center New York, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Vienna State Opera and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.

With Sampling Baroque/Bach Özdemir designed his first creation for the Schaffhausen Bach Festival in 2016. Back then, he already toured with it, including to the Bachakademie Stuttgart. Now the new production Opium, which had its world premiere on May 15 at Kammgarn West in Schaffhausen.

Musica Sequenza played in a string quintet (with bass), plus lute, keyboard, a soprano and a sound designer as well as Özdemir himself on bassoon and as ensemble leader. The line-up changes constantly in Opium, new music follows baroque pieces and vice versa, including electronic alienation.

The production opened with a fantasia for solo lute by Silvius Leopold Weiss, followed by five arias by Bach, either for bassoon, strings and basso continuo alone or with vocals - and in between the Sarbande for solo cello. The musicians moved around the room and played other works from the Baroque period. And in between, four new pieces by Özdemir: Opium, The Sacred Wounds, Fata Morgana and Moroccan Dream. In the project's namesake Opium Özdemir explores the possibilities of synthesizing music for bassoon, strings and electronically generated sounds. This resulted in a fascinating extended listening experience that had something dreamlike about it. The Sacred Wounds from Özdemir's project Bach: Atlas Passion is originally a contemplative 4-channel audio installation for chamber choir, in which geographical references from the Torah, Bible and Koran are related to current global political issues. The version for string quartet, which was performed for the first time at the Bach Festival, also has something enchanting and magical about it.

The performance lasted 70 minutes and was divided into two parts. After the first part, you were invited into another room. There, you were given headphones through which you could either listen to the live sound or not. In this way, you were immersed in this modern acoustic-visual synthesis of the arts, in which baroque music resounded as if from afar. The lighting dramaturgy and movement also played an important role.

To complement this impressive performance, Burak Özdemir and curator and visual designer Daniel Mulder created an exhibition in the Chretzeturm in Stein am Rhein. Their motto "Opium locked down" referred to the artists' coronavirus isolation. It was a course of four installations spread across the floors of the building. On an audiovisual level, visitors could experience how the artists from Musica Sequenza occupied themselves at home during the lockdown: how they practiced, ate an apple, talked on the phone, fetched a glass of water in the kitchen ...

It was dreamy and delicate reflections that drifted through the Chretzeturm to intense sounds, as if the ensemble were there. But the rooms were empty, just as the stages had been for some time. This exhibition offered an impressive combination of sound art and visual design: calm, sometimes repetitive images cast a spell over you, while the music had something forlorn about it.

Born in 1990, Yumi Ito lives and works in Basel, performs regularly all over the world and has shared the stage with personalities such as Al Jarreau, Becca Stevens, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Mark Turner. Her own art includes jazz, art-pop, electronica, free improvisation and neo-classical music, flexibly performable from solo to orchestra. Her new album "Stardust Crystals" is available on all relevant platforms.

The ZHdK offers a Bachelor's degree in Jazz and Pop and a Master's degree in Music Education with a specialization in instrumental/vocal music education (jazz or pop). The latter prepares students for a career in the fields of performance, creation, production and business and also enables them to work as teachers in music schools, secondary schools or private lessons.

According to a press release issued on June 16, state-of-the-art event technology and climate neutrality are setting new standards. The removal of the panorama hall is the most striking structural change - from the concert foyer, the audience now has "an unobstructed view of the lake and mountains again". The brilliance of the sound has been restored - "over the years, the acoustic radiance of the original hall has diminished considerably. The restoration of the Grosser Tonhalle, one of the largest restoration projects in Switzerland, aimed to bring the hall back to its 1895 condition. The genuine gilding, the stucco marble surfaces of the columns, the chandeliers and the ceiling paintings on canvas from this period allow the hall to shine again today. Technically, an audiovisual studio has been added that meets the needs of streaming perfectly. Another new feature of the Great Hall is its organ: it was tailored to the needs of the renovated Tonhalle Zurich in the workshops of organ builder Kuhn AG in Männedorf. As both a soloist and an outstanding, modern orchestral instrument, it can be used with agility and pays homage to the hall in terms of sound."

The Tonhalle Orchestra will be performing at the Tonhalle Maag until the end of the season on July 2. The opening concerts in the Tonhalle will take place on September 15 and 16, with advance sales starting on August 23.

The public is invited to visit the newly renovated rooms on September 4 and 5. You can register via the website www.seeyouamsee.ch
 

Photo: Kongresshaus Zürich AG

Clear view from the windows of the concert foyer after the removal of the panorama hall.

According to a statement from the Bern University of the Arts (HKB), two conditions had to be met in order to take part in the JazzBeet competition in Bonn: The trio members had to be under the age of 27 and develop a composition based on a work by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Matthieu Mazué's trio won over the judges during the ten-hour jury session. Matthieu Mazué and Michael Cina, who studied at the HKB, and Xaver Rüegg, who studied at the ZHdK (Zurich University of the Arts), can look forward to prize money and a live performance at one of the upcoming concerts at the Bonn Jazz Festival.

The jury member Ulrich Stock on the winners: "A trio with outstanding interaction between equal players, powerful without lacking sensitivity, contemporary in its aesthetics, with a refreshing courage to take risks. Transparent and dense, sometimes poetic, sometimes mysterious, and with the gift of calmly developing tension. Complex, but not over the top. We thought it was great."

All study participants (sopranos) sang "Happy Birthday" individually in a studio. They were then asked to listen to and evaluate recordings of their own vocal performances and those of their colleagues. Pitch accuracy, i.e. the ability to hit the right notes, was used as a yardstick.

The research team derived a statistical model from the participants' ratings by their colleagues. Using this, they were able to determine how well a singer rated others as well as her own performance. "The results show that the singers were surprisingly inaccurate in their self-assessment. Most of them overestimated their own performance," summarizes first author Pauline Larrouy-Maestri from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics.

In addition, the team observed that a singer who performed better in terms of pitch accuracy also rated herself better. This finding is surprising, as experts generally tend to underestimate their own abilities in their area of expertise.

The study not only underlines the fact that even professional singers do not necessarily classify their own vocal performance correctly. It also suggests that self-assessment can be a key factor in the development of exceptional musical abilities.

Original publication:
Larrouy-Maestri, P., Wang, Z., Vairo Nunes, R. and Poeppel, D. (2021). Are you your own best judge? On the self-evaluation of singing. Journal of Voice. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2021.03.028

Georges Aperghis was born in Athens in 1945. He has lived and worked in Paris since 1963. In 1976, he founded ATEM, a music theater workshop anchored in the social reality of a Parisian suburb (Bagnolet).

The most important contemporary music ensembles in Europe - Ictus, Klangforum Wien, Remix, Musikfabrik, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Nieuw Ensemble, Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart and so on - have developed a close collaboration with Georges Aperghis, regularly commissioning works from him, all of which have been included in their respective repertoires.

Aperghis has already been honored with the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize (2011), the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale (2015) and the BBVA Borders of Knowledge Foundation Prize in the Contemporary Music category (2016), among others.

As in 2020, the Festival for New Music Forum Valais will take place over three days this year instead of at Whitsun in August due to the pandemic. School and choir projects as well as the art exhibition have been postponed to 2022. Lovers of interdisciplinary, chamber music and experimental formats, music theater and new electronic music will still get their money's worth: The Competition for acousmatic music, Ars Electronica Forum Walliswill be held for the 7th time this year. The electro-acoustic works will be interpreted by Simone Conforti from the CIMM Biennale Musica Venezia and IRCAM Paris. The composer and percussionist Lukas Ligeti will also be a guest in Leuk. He is the son of György Ligeti and has been one of the world's most important promoters of African music in the western world for 30 years. The musicians of the Ensemble Modern are also coming to Leuk for the second time. Around 30 contemporary works by composers from as many countries can be heard, as well as some of the most exciting and important Swiss acts with the Hyper Duo, UMS 'n JIP, Lukas Huber, Urban Mäder, Silke Strahl, Hanspeter Pfammatter, Gerry Hemingway, Roberto Domeniconi and Manuel Mengis.

A premature Seat reservation is recommended due to the reduced number of seats available due to the current safety regulations. The complete program is available at http://forumwallis.ch to find.

The Forum Valais is an international festival for new music and takes place every year at Leuk Castle on the German-French language border in the heart of the Valais Alps. It is run by the IGNM-VS, the local branch of the International Society for New Music IGNM (ISCM), and has co-produced over 300 world premieres since 2006: Highlights of the festival's history include Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet together with the Arditti Quartet and Air Glaciers, Cod.Acts Pendulum Choir as well as regular guest performances by world-class ensembles such as recherche, Klangforum Wien and Ensemble Modern.
 

A glass complex near the United Nations is planned as a home for the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the University of Music. The Cité concert hall would have 1580 seats. The building would cost CHF 300 million, with annual operating costs of CHF 3.5 million, financed by private individuals and the federal government.

An alliance of the Greens, the Left and the SVP formed against the project. The opposition was based on the costs, the loss of a manor house and trees that would have to make way for the Cité. Cultural workers also feared that classical music would be given preferential treatment. However, the State Council of the Canton of Geneva made the final decision on the project.

After the 2016 cultural concept was extended by one year in coordination with the legislature, the new edition is now available. Seven priorities have been defined for the next four-year period. Three priorities from the previous cultural concept - cultural mediation, cooperation between museums and diversity and social cohesion - will be continued and deepened.

The two former priorities of music and literature will now be continued under the heading of creation. The Government Council has also formulated three new priorities: "Textiles and Cooperation with the Economy and International Exchange" is dedicated to the historical past and economic future. The fact that culture is more than just a single artistic work and has a decisive influence on community life is taken into account by the new focus on "Interdisciplinary platforms". In addition, "Social and financial perspectives for the future" will draw conclusions from the experiences of the coronavirus pandemic.

More info:
https://www.ar.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/Departement_Bildung_Kultur/Amt_fuer_Kultur/Kulturfoerderung/Kulturkonzepte/Kulturkonzept_2021.pdf

According to the HKB press release, Ronny Graupe "enriches many important projects in the scene with his highly virtuoso and clever guitar playing as a bandleader and sidemusician". He had an astonishingly large output in 2019 and 2020 and was the initiator of "Into The Shed", a concert series in Lockdown, where he ensured a great deal of networking and visibility for the scene.

The German Jazz Award shines the spotlight on the diversity and creative power of the German jazz scene and honors exceptional, artistic and innovative achievements in a national and international context with awards in 31 categories.