On the campus, more than 500 Bachelor's and Master's students, almost 500 continuing education participants and around 200 employees of the School of Music will learn, teach and conduct research as well as present their work to the public on around 8,000 square meters. With the new building, the Lucerne School of Music is bringing together its previous four locations spread across Lucerne in one place. The new building will be officially opened with a musical program from 11 to 13 September. Public events will be held in the three new concert halls until the end of the year.

The coronavirus crisis is particularly evident in the numbers of foreign students: most international students come from Europe, while enrolments from non-European countries have decreased significantly. The group of exchange students who only come to HSLU for one semester has shrunk. Only half as many students registered for an exchange semester as in the previous year.

With the aim of enabling a rapid assessment of general aesthetic responsiveness, a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics has developed a method that should make it easier to select samples for studies in the future. The so-called Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA) makes it possible to differentiate between people who regularly react intensely to works of art and those who rarely experience more than an everyday appreciation of aesthetic objects.

The scale is based on a questionnaire that was compiled with the aim of identifying people who react particularly to aesthetic stimuli and are therefore suitable for participation in a study. How strongly a person reacts to music, visual arts and poetry can be determined with the AReA scale within the categories "Aesthetic Appreciation", "Intense Aesthetic Experience" and "Creative Behavior" and can be used for the selection of particularly responsive samples.

The assessment procedure was tested with almost 800 participants in studies in the United States and Germany and can be carried out equally in both languages. The publication has appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts of the American Psychological Association.

Original publication:
Schlotz, W., Wallot, S., Omigie, D., Masucci, M. D., Hoelzmann, S. C., & Vessel, E. A. (2020). The Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA): A screening tool to assess individual differences in responsiveness to art in English and German. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000348
 

The number of participants per year is steadily increasing, writes the BAK. In 2019, the number of applications more than doubled compared to 2017. This can be seen in the report on the 2016-2020 funding period published by the BAK.

In total, over 46,000 children and young people across Switzerland have taken part in Y+M programs to date. As of June 2020, around 17,000 children and young people were registered for Y+M courses and camps (2017: around 8,700; 2018: around 15,500; 2019: almost 21,000). At the end of June 2020, the program had 1,036 certified Y+M leaders.

Since the launch of Y+M, the federal government has invested around CHF 7.5 million in the program. Around CHF 5 million of this was spent on supporting Y+M courses and Y+M camps, and around CHF 500,000 on contributions to the training and further education of Y+M leaders. Since 2019, the Principality of Liechtenstein has also been participating in the Y+M program on the basis of an intergovernmental agreement concluded in May 2018.

Original article:
https://www.bak.admin.ch/bak/de/home/aktuelles/nsb-news.msg-id-80298.html

The style of European classical music has also been composed on distant islands in the past. For example, the Riemann Music Dictionary mentions the composer Otto Jägermeier, born in Munich in 1870, who emigrated from war-torn Europe to Madagascar in 1915 and composed symphonic poems such as In the jungle or the Suite tananariviennenamed after the Malagasy capital Tananarive. And recently there has also been talk of another islander who wrote his scores far away from our civilization. He went by the Portuguese-Spanish name José Diego Coimbra and lived, it is said, from 1824 to 1865 on the island of Mondariz, a small volcanic island in the South Atlantic, five days' journey by mail boat from the South American mainland.

Coimbra is an apparition that arouses curiosity. An eccentric who you would hardly have heard of if he had not been made the ghostly protagonist of a novel. The author is Yorck Kronenberg, who was born in 1973 in Reutlingen, Swabia. Mondariz has now published his fifth novel. As a writer and concert pianist, he has a double talent. This makes him uniquely capable of both telling an exciting story about the long-dead composer and expressing himself with musical expertise. According to Kronenberg, the scores were long kept in the island's main town, a sleepy settlement from the colonial era, where the inhabitants do a poor job of keeping the memory of the exotic composer alive. In the hope that tourists will come one day, they have set up his house, the Casa Coimbra, as a small memorial and thus saved it from creeping decay.

Between hyperrealism and fiction

Kronenberg's book offers the reader a sly mixture of hyper-realistic description and fiction. The first-person narrator, who we can assume is the author himself, visited the island ten years ago to investigate the composer's footsteps. Now he has come back for a second time to take a closer look at the scores and the documents stowed away in old trunks and to reappraise Coimbra's living environment biographically. He delves into village life and the colonial history of the island, but has mixed experiences with the suspicious locals during his research. While he tries to find his feet in this foreign world, his European past catches up with him in the form of text messages from his former partner. She had accompanied him on his first visit to the island, but now the two are thousands of kilometers apart in a painful separation process. These two levels are skillfully intertwined in the narrative.

Despite all the practical shortcomings and heartache, the figure of the composer and his music gradually take shape. When the narrator leaves the island again on a barge at the end, he is a few experiences richer. By immersing himself in a foreign land, he has also plunged into his inner self. He now knows that the world of the islanders will always remain closed to him, he has distanced himself from his ex-girlfriend in distant Europe, and the music of Coimbra has become more familiar to him, intertwined with the inscrutable reality of the island. He takes a few scores home with him as trophies.
And here they are in the hands of the author and pianist Yorck Kronenberg. He has described them knowledgeably in his book, for example the great symphony in C sharp minor, a late work from 1862, in which the conductor can ask the musicians to only fake the playing so that the movements continue but no sound is heard. Here, Coimbra anticipates the experiments in instrumental theater that avant-garde composers such as Dieter Schnebel were to take up again a hundred years later.

In a musical-literary Sunday soiree at the Künstlerhaus Boswil on August 30, 2020, visitors were able to gain a concrete impression of Coimbra's hitherto literary existence and his music. Kronenberg and the Casal Quartet performed two of the composer's works, with the author reading a few passages from his book in between. Christine Egerszegi, President of the Advisory Board of the Boswil Foundation, chatted with him and guided the audience through the program.

Kronenberg is a reader and conversationalist who is a pleasure to listen to. As a pianist, he takes full risks. This was particularly evident in Bach's Piano Concerto in D minor. It was played in a version with string quartet at the end of the evening. At a brilliant tempo and technically well-equipped, he chased through the outer movements, the quartet always close on his heels and quick to react. One more rehearsal would have done the whole thing good. In the middle movement, the pianist was also able to show off his introverted side to advantage.

The core of the concert and the audience's curiosity were, of course, the two original works by the mysterious composer. At the beginning, Kronenberg played Dos Estudios para Piano. The first etude trumps with motoric chord repetition in the left hand and sweeping, monophonic melodies in the right hand. The second is freer in movement and harmonically more colorful. Both sound like an innocent anticipation of the rhythm pieces by Prokofiev or Bartók. The following string quartet was a world premiere. The four-movement work is imbued with a warm emotionality, a thoughtful tone prevails. A uniform, polyphonically layered network of voices characterizes the first movement. In the second, individual expressive figurations emerge, which then take on a concrete character in the form of laments in the long final movement with descending lines and torn-off small glissandi. It seems as if Coimbra had anticipated the pain of love of his later biographer.

What are we to make of the musical achievements of this loner, who wrote his scores undauntedly on a godforsaken tropical island in the South Atlantic, in the knowledge that he would probably never be heard in his lifetime? Anyone reading Kronenberg's novel is drawn step by step into this improbable situation. One begins to believe in the existence of Coimbra, behind the fiction a new, strong reality becomes visible. However, the listening impression of his compositions only partially confirms the promises of uniqueness that the book makes. The fiction remains stronger in this case. Nevertheless, the discovery of Mondariz's musical and literary world was well worth the trip to Boswil.

PS: The composer Otto Jägermeier is a musicological-lexigraphical joke. The island of Mondariz cannot be found on any map.
Yorck Kronenberg: Mondariz. Dörlemann publishing house, Zurich 2020, 283 pages

When you read that the composer Martha von Castelberg (1892-1971) received neither piano nor composition lessons, listening to the CD with her motets as well as secular and sacred songs makes you wonder: if Lili Boulanger had written her song cycle Clairières dans le ciel without regular composition lessons, Fanny Hensel wrote her piano work The year be able to write without many years of piano lessons? Does self-taught learning of an instrument lead you to discover new paths, and could it be that composing without studying with a teacher prevents you from following well-trodden stylistic paths?

Castelberg's songs, but not her motets, lead one to believe that a trained craftsman would have been more conducive to her composing and that her undoubted talent could have unfolded more freely. One has the feeling that her songs are accompanied somewhat simply by the piano and that a little pianistic sophistication would also suit the sacred texts.

Who was Martha von Castelberg? The Zurich native grew up as the daughter of a private banker in a strictly Catholic middle-class home. She received violin lessons at an early age, but was not allowed to study music despite her talent. As Sibylle Ehrismann writes in her informative CD booklet, von Castelberg, who was very devout and spiritually interested, campaigned with her husband for Zurich Catholicism, which had a difficult time in the reformed city. Many of her compositions have a religious background, others have a connection to Disentis in Graubünden, her husband's homeland.

The four singers and the pianist interpret the songs with audible commitment, rich in color and finely crafted. If you listen to all the songs, which are quite attractive individually, one after the other, a certain monotony sets in, especially with the sacred songs, as the works are not varied enough. It is remarkable that there are hardly any other settings of the chosen texts - for example by Fontane, Rückert, Bergengruen and Rhaeto-Romanic poets.

The real discovery on the CD, however, are the five motets for mixed voices. They are interpreted by the Basel larynx vocal ensemble under the direction of Jakob Pilgram at the highest level, with a beautiful sound and with every desirable differentiation. Although firmly anchored in the tradition of sacred music, the motets fascinate with their distinctive, "modern" harmony. They are probably Martha von Castelberg's most important contribution to Swiss music of the 20th century.

The names, work titles and song texts in the booklet contain quite a few errors, which is particularly noticeable in an otherwise so careful edition.

Although composed in 1821/22 and therefore by no means a "last work", the Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor op. 111 is shrouded in an aura of mystery. Adolf Bernhard Marx already titled the corresponding chapter of his 1859 biography of Beethoven "Farewell to the Piano". Thomas Mann referred to this in his Doctor Faustus but diagnosed, seconded by Theodor W. Adorno and more factually accurate, a "farewell to the sonata" in a double sense - namely in Beethoven himself, but also with regard to the genre, which could no longer really assert itself on the market. In 1839, Robert Schumann noted with a saddened look at the piano sonata: "The public is hard to buy, the publisher is hard to print, and the composers are deterred by all sorts of reasons, perhaps also internal ones, from writing such old-fashioned works."

The situation is, of course, more complicated (as is so often the case), especially as Beethoven's "farewell" was a long and by no means straightforward process. For example, the last piano concerto (op. 73) was composed as early as 1810, the last piano trio (op. 97) the following year. On the other hand, the Diabelli Variations (op. 120) was only completed after the Sonata op. 111, as were the sometimes quite experimental Bagatelles op. 126. So what are we to make of characterizations that see the sonata as a "testament", as "profound music of the spheres", as "final spiritualization, dissolution in space" or as a "prelude to silence"? They cannot be related specifically to Beethoven or to a contemporary source. However, they offer the opportunity to put one's own feelings about the music into words, to reveal more about the musical language and expression than a purely technical-analytical description can.

In fact, the poetically shaped interpretations refer less to the first movement with its truly stormy, polyphonic main idea. Rather, they are aimed at the second (and last) movement - an arietta with variations in which the material is not merely colored, but often transcends into pure sound.

Link to the project homepage "52 x Beethoven"

The ZHdK buildings are once again open to the public every day, Monday to Sunday, from 7 am to 7 pm. This also applies to the Museum of Design, the Le Corbusier Pavilion, the bar and garden of the Mehrspur music club and the Chez Toni bistro. The Media and Information Center (MIZ) is open again until 11 September from Monday to Friday from 10 am to 4 pm.

On August 17, the university management decided to conduct the fall semester in face-to-face classes. Since August 24, masks have been compulsory in all courses, including those in pre- and continuing education. In addition, masks are now compulsory wherever they are indicated. Masks are also compulsory in the Media and Information Center (MIZ). In the public areas of the ZHdK buildings, the distance rule applies, but there is no general obligation to wear a mask.

From now on, guests' contact details will be collected every time they visit Mensa Molki, Chez Toni, Kafi Z and Café Momento. Contact details can either be collected using the Campus Card or a QR code. In addition, masks are compulsory in the self-service area, in front of the issuing points and at the checkouts. The recommendations of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) and the Canton of Zurich also apply. The guidelines and specifications of the ZHdK may change at any time.
 

The French opera singer and composer Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) was one of the most versatile artists of the 19th century. At that time, it was hardly possible for women to develop their talents. Nevertheless, she made a name for herself as a singer, composer and woman of the world. As a singer, she was comparable to stars such as Adele or Netrebko, except that she obviously had a far greater vocal range than them. The meetings in her salon with famous contemporaries such as Franz Liszt or Clara and Robert Schumann must have been legendary and only begin to show what an interesting personality she must have been. As a woman of today, one always searches in vain for female role models in the past. In the case of Pauline Viardot, one is rewarded and in this project her legacy as a composer is to be fully appreciated and, above all, heard!

Aurea Marston, Cornelia Lenzin, Simona Mango and Nicolaia Marston would like to celebrate Viardot's 200th birthday with a semi-staged concert in May 2021. Her songs, duets and song arrangements will play the main role. They will be complemented by other songs and duets by composers from her circle of friends (e.g. Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt or Clara and Robert Schumann). In addition to the music, the performers also want to bring the composer's life and times to life with a great deal of humor. A light-footed staging gives the program a narrative thread and a humorous touch. The aim is to bring this wonderful music of the Romantic period to a wide audience.

In times of Corona, traditional fundraising has left the performers high and dry, which is why they looked for new ways to finance the project and started crowdfunding:
www.lokalhelden.ch/concerts
 

The library of Engelberg Abbey holds a printed part from 1764, written by Franz Joseph Leonti Meyer von Schauensee (1720-1789) from Lucerne, who composed the four concerti for harpsichord or organ and orchestra. His life, which ended in the year of the French Revolution, was shaped by his patrician lineage. His parents inherited Schauensee Castle above Kriens and henceforth called themselves Meyer von Schauensee. (This castle, painted by Mara Meier, is emblazoned on the cover pictures of the scores).

Joseph's musical family gave him singing and organ lessons from the age of five, so that the precocious boy was soon able to substitute for his teacher at the organs of the Hofkirche St. Leodegar in Lucerne. He learned to play the violin and cello at monastery schools in St. Gallen. Back in Lucerne, he taught himself the basics of composition and created music for the Jesuit school theater as early as 1738. The young man spent 1740-41 in Milan. Impressed by the glittering musical life and the works of the Neapolitan school (Feo, Leo, Pergolesi), he acquired further virtuosity on the violin and harpsichord, which made him a popular composer. Chamber Sonatas for the Clavecin which have unfortunately been lost.

After his return, his father organized an officer's position for him with the King of Sardinia-Piedmont. But despite his military duties, he found time to compose. The cold and wet weather in the mountains and the storms on the Mediterranean inspired him to write future works. His later positions in Lucerne as Grand Councillor and supervisor of the Reis-Waage left him enough time for music; he conducted and played the organ in Engelberg, Muri, St. Gallen, Beromünster and was called in as an organ expert in Rheinau. From the age of 32, he retired from secular offices and concentrated on spiritual and musical tasks at St. Leodegar Abbey. In 1760 he founded the first public Collegium musicum and in 1775 he founded the Helvetic Concorde Society, an association that propagated the national unity of the Old Swiss Confederacy. His music was highly regarded during his lifetime - even father and son Mozart performed his church music - and his virtuosity and imagination were praised. However, with the political and cultural upheavals following Meyer's death, his music sank into oblivion.

Now the Solothurn organist Hans-Rudolf Binz has carefully re-edited the four concerti mentioned above to mark the 300th anniversary of the composer's birth. Each of the three-movement works has a special character. The first concludes virtuosically with a prestissimo ed alla breve, the second calls for martellato and sospirando, the third is a Christmas concerto with piverone (bagpipe) pedal tones and allegretto ed amoroso lullaby, the fourth Il Molino rapid apeggios imitate the rattling of a mill. Concerti II and III require two horns ad lib in addition to the strings. The editor has included printed solutions for the cadenzas requested by the composer in I and IV.

The introduction and revision report in German, French and English provide detailed information about the composer and his contemporary history (the biographical details given here are based on this), performance and editorial practice. The works were recorded as early as 1949 on Radio Bern by Eugen Huber, who also carefully added missing parts (a pity that these additions are missing in the new edition!), and in 1975 with Philippe Laubscher and François Pantillon on record. The beautiful new material inspires new performances!

Franz Joseph Leonti Meyer von Schauensee: Quattro Concerti armonici d'Organo o di Cembalo op. 8, parte 1ma.
Concerto I in C major, M&S 2367
Concderto II in D major, M&S 2368
Concerto III in G major, M&S 2369
Concerto IV in A major "il molino", M&S 2370
Score I, II, IV/III: Fr. 38.00/22.00, piano reduction Fr. 28.00/18.00, parts Fr. 8.00/5.00 each;
Müller & Schade, Berne

The name Albert Moeschinger only appears sporadically in concert programs in Switzerland, and he seems to be almost unknown to the younger generation of musicians. He was born in Basel in 1897, where he also went to school and then - in accordance with his father's wishes - began an apprenticeship as a banker. However, he soon abandoned this and devoted himself to music studies in Bern, Leipzig and Munich. He initially earned his living as a coffee house musician and later as a teacher at the Bern Conservatory.

As a composer, Moeschinger explored the most diverse styles and created an oeuvre of over 100 opus numbers in almost all genres. Prominent soloists such as Walter Gieseking played his piano concertos, while Hermann Scherchen, Paul Sacher and other conductors championed his orchestral works.

For health reasons, Moeschinger gave up his teaching position in Bern in 1943 and subsequently lived as a freelance artist in Saas Fee, Ascona and Thun, where he died in 1985.

Why is his music so rarely performed today? It cannot be due to its quality. His piano concertos and works for solo piano in particular reveal an extremely skillful use of the instrument's possibilities. And so one can only be grateful that the publisher Müller & Schade has published the Sonatina op. 66 has been newly published. A varied three-movement work on a total of 13 pages, which is reminiscent of Ravel's Sonatine pour piano, and not only because of its short length. In Ravel's case, too, the title does not refer to a student piece, but rather a deliberate, economical reduction of the temporal dimension.

The pianistic demands are not overly great, and the piano writing is generally very good. Some passages require skillful crossing of the hands (which is sometimes a little awkward in Ravel's work ...). Despite the deliberate reduction of compositional means, the three movements are very different in character and sound, so that the impression of a rich musical parcours remains in one's memory.

Hopefully the publisher Müller &Schade will publish more such trouvailles by Moeschinger in the future. (So far available for piano are: Kleine Klavierstücke M&S 1999, Danses américaines M&S 2095, Fête de capricorne, M&S 2107). And then perhaps also with some accompanying text and further information on this exciting musician.

Albert Moeschinger: Sonatina for piano op. 66, M&S 2144, Fr. 12.00, Müller & Schade, Bern

Outside the French cultural sphere, the two string quartets op. 112 (1899) and op. 153 (1918) by Camille Saint-Saëns lead a marginal existence. The works of other French composers are too dominant, above all the epochal milestones of the genre by Claude Debussy (op. 10, 1893) and Maurice Ravel (F major, 1904). But the contributions of Darius Milhaud, Gabriel Fauré and César Franck have not been completely forgotten either.

Saint-Saëns is a phenomenon in music history. Like Max Bruch, he never left the path of tonality and some of his works sound out of time. However, while Bruch's Quintet in A minor and Octet in B flat major from 1918/19, for example, could have been written 60 years earlier, the French composer's two string quartets in E minor (1899) and G major (1918) clearly show traits of their time of composition. Saint-Saëns was quite open-minded towards Gustav Mahler and other modernists who followed on from late Romanticism, while he described those who overturned the known laws and forms, such as Igor Stravinsky, Debussy and the group Les Six, as "madmen".

His music is always technically flawless, characterized by great sophistication and ingenuity as well as captivating melodies. At the same time, it is always closely linked to tradition and anchored in the formal principles that have evolved over the centuries. At the same time, however, it is full of surprises, brilliant ideas and effects that cannot be found elsewhere. It thus characterizes the individualist Saint-Säens, who has often been unjustly called backward simply because he did not want to follow the upheavals of the 20th century. For he constantly mutated in his own style, the only one available to him, even if he occasionally chose to go backwards. It is also possible to be innovative in an ancestral language that makes its roots recognizable. It should not be forgotten that the composer was a fiery pianist and musician to the very end.

The two quartets are very different. Due to its length of 30 minutes alone, the 1st String Quartet towers above its counterpart of Haydnian brevity, written almost a generation later. The Bärenreiter publisher's announcement states that the form and style of the quartets refer (among other things) to the aesthetics of this great father of the genre. This is sometimes shockingly true in the 2nd Quartet, but as a sales argument or stigma - depending on how you look at it - it falls far too short. The composer always corrects and counteracts this closeness immediately with the unexpected, for example with grandiose, complex fugal techniques. In the more traditional late work, the deeply felt slow movement is particularly engaging, which can certainly be understood as an allusion to the devastation and sadness of the time. The 1st Quartet, much played by the great stars of the string scene in the French-speaking world immediately after its publication (e.g. by Eugène Ysaÿe and Pablo Sarasate), is nothing less than an unqualified masterpiece. With its rich harmonies, counterpoint and effect passages, rhythmically gripping like the Scherzo, grateful strings and full of passionate melody, it deserves its rightful place alongside the works of the famous late Romantics.

Camille Saint-Saëns: String Quartet No. 1 in E minor op. 112, parts, BA 10927, € 32.95; String Quartet No. 2 in G major op. 153, parts, BA 10928, € 34.95; No. 1 + 2, study score, TP 779, € 29.95; Bärenreiter, Kassel

You could dryly call it "contributions to biographical research". But Werner Grünzweig's "Conversations with six composers and one female composer about their student days" offers far more than subjective retrospectives of composers who have since become successful. If you read the interviews with Peter Ablinger, Orm Finnendahl, Georg Friedrich Haas, Hanspeter Kyburz, Bernhard Lang, Isabel Mundry and Enno Poppe carefully, you will gain deep, lively and multifaceted insights that say a lot about aesthetic education, psychology and, last but not least, about a certain milieu called New Music.

The Austrian composer and composition professor Gösta Neuwirth is a constant point of reference. From around 1980 to 1990, he was the teacher of all seven portrayed, partly in Graz and later in Berlin. Neuwirth was a liberal patron to whom composition technique meant a lot, but not everything. He talked to his students about films, literature and painting. Hanspeter Kyburz, who grew up in Switzerland, was inspired by his time studying in Graz precisely because of its diversity: "Gosta's lessons were very stimulating, very open, foreign worlds. But what do you do with these aliens that you've seen?"

A central question indeed. Anyone who considers the development of the seven very different composers comes to the conclusion that each of them built their own aesthetic world. Kyburz went in an almost scientific-objective direction, Peter Ablinger pursued a conceptual-boundary-crossing aesthetic, while Georg Friedrich Haas successfully turned to microtonal sound exploration. The fact that he did not develop a school in the sense of Arnold Schönberg clearly speaks in Neuwirth's favor. There are much more rigid composition professors with a much narrower concept of music.

Although Neuwirth is the connecting link, Grünzweig is not primarily concerned with teaching composition. In the interviews - already conducted in 2007 and 2008 - he asks his questions openly, guided by the flow of conversation and tailored to the respective composer. This method leads to a captivating variety of topics and a very personal tone. Even experts on one composer or another will find out something new and be able to read between the lines (especially where names are not mentioned). Looking back to the 1980s is almost melancholy. Back then, there was obviously far more freedom than there is today, when even composition studies are gradually being made more academic. Basically, the book is a plea for liberal openness - an openness that makes self-determined and self-confident paths possible in the first place.

Werner Grünzweig: How is music created? Conversations with six composers and one female composer about their time as students, 200 p., € 19.80, von Bockel-Verlag, Neumünster 2019, ISBN 978-3-95675-026-7

The eight miniatures for two violins by Rudolf Kelterborn have a total performance time of seven minutes - plus the "clear relaxation pauses" recommended by the composer. The Eight ideasas he calls them, can be performed in any order, which is why the scores are printed on single sheets. The demanding complementary-rhythmic formations require great presence of mind. The technical demands are varied and very stimulating. When ideas are expressed, there are pauses for thought; accordingly, fermatas are often prescribed on rests or sounds (sometimes even the duration in seconds!). Excitement, vocal tranquillity, exact busyness and homophonic dance alternate.

Rudolf Kelterborn, born in 1931 - "composer, musical thinker, mediator", as Andreas Briner calls him in the title of his book published in 1993 - dedicated these duos to Bettina Boller and Malwina Sosnowski.

Rudolf Kelterborn: Eight ideas for two violins (2018), BA 11408, € 28.50, Bärenreiter, Kassel

After 13 years in office, Valentin Bischof has stepped down as President of the SBC. At the association's delegates' meeting, Luana-Menoud Baldi, who has been a member of the association's management since 2021, won out over professional musician Armin Bachmann as his successor with a clear majority. Menoud-Baldi, who was born in Ticino and now lives in the canton of Fribourg, is the first woman to hold this position.

The delegates of the SBC met at the Kultur- und Kongresshaus Aarau for their annual meeting, which should have taken place in March but had to be postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. As the largest amateur music association in Switzerland, the association has 30 member associations with almost 70,000 musicians.

Johann Sebastian Bach prefaced some of his cantatas with a sinfonia as an instrumental introduction instead of an opening chorus. These are always chamber music gems with often unusual instrumentation.

The present Concertino a 5 now combines the symphonies of the cantatas BWV 18 and 152 (As the rain and snow fall from the sky and Step onto the path of faith) into a three-movement instrumental work. In order to make the combination of the pieces possible, the instrumentation had to be coordinated. That of the cantata introduction to BWV 152 with alto recorder, oboe, viola (originally viola d'amore), viola da gamba and basso continuo was adopted unchanged. The original instrumentation of the Sinfonia of BWV 18 was quite unusual with four violas and continuo; in the revival it was even reinforced by two partially colla parte octave recorders. Major changes have now been made to this piece: the two original upper viola parts have been transferred to the recorder and oboe with partly altered octave positions or exchanged parts, and the viola da gamba and viola da gamba have been included in the motif. Minor technical retouching on both string instruments completes the preparation for this new and attractive instrumentation.

The rearranged Sinfonia now forms the first movement of this concertino, in which falling rain and snow are musically depicted in the character of a chaconne. The Adagio from BWV 152 in the middle movement, which is only four bars long and features finely chiseled upper voices, leads to one of the few instrumental fugues in Bach's cantata works.

The question arises as to whether it is legitimate to make such major interventions in a work. There are three reasons for this: Bach himself dealt with his compositions in a similarly free manner and changed instrumentation, just as a free approach to instrumentation was common at the time. Secondly, all the changes are plausibly explained and carefully documented. And thirdly, two independent symphonies are thus combined to form a new work that represents an absolute enrichment of the chamber music literature in terms of sound and composition.

Johann Sebastian Bach: Concertino a 5 after instrumental movements from Weimar church cantatas, for treble recorder, oboe, viola da braccio, viola da gamba and b.c., edited by Klaus Hofmann, EW 1085, € 21.80, Edition Walhall, Magdeburg