Daniel Hope will begin his directorship at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival 2026, the 70th edition of the festival named after its founder Yehudi Menuhin. Following an extensive, multi-stage selection process, he was unanimously elected as the new artistic director on the recommendation of the appointment committee. Hope has known Gstaad for many years and has had close personal and musical ties with festival founder Yehudi Menuhin since his childhood. His mother Eleanor Hope was Yehudi Menuhin's personal assistant.

Hope has been Music Director of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra since 2016, which also has close historical ties to the festival. He also has leadership roles at the Savannah Music Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and the Philharmonie Essen. He is currently Artistic Director of the Frauenkirche Dresden and President of the Beethoven House in Bonn.

Grace Newcombe specializes in medieval and renaissance music. She performs throughout Europe and records with renowned medieval renaissance ensembles such as Ensemble Leones, Peregrina, Le Miroir de Musique, Ensemble Gilles Binchois, SchoEnsemble Dragma and Musicke & Mirth. She is the founder and director of the medieval ensemble Rumorum. As an instrumentalist, she has performed with medieval harps and Clavicymbalum can be heard.

Grace studied at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where she obtained a Master's degree with distinction in Early Music Vocal Pedagogy. Since then she has taught there regularly as a guest or substitute teacher for singing, Tudor and Elizabethan vocal polyphony, medieval vocal polyphony and Gregorian chant.

As a performer and teacher, Grace specializes in non-classical vocal techniques and currently also teaches voice training at the Institut Jazz in Basel. She wrote her doctoral thesis on performance practices for vernacular songs in thirteenth-century Britain. She uncovered previously unknown melodic and textual peculiarities of Middle English verse.

Alexandra Dovgan, who according to the press release was born into a family of musicians in 2007, began her piano studies at the age of four and a half and passed the entrance exam for the Central Academic Music School in Moscow at the age of five. She has won numerous international competitions, including the Vladimir Krainev Moscow International Piano Competition. At the age of ten, she was awarded the Grand Prix at the II International Grand Piano Competition in Moscow. Alexandra has already performed in the Berlin Philharmonie, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam under conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel and Paavo Järvi.

The Prix Serdang was established in 2022 and awarded to Martin James Bartlett. Ariel Lanyi received the prize in 2023. It is endowed with 50,000 francs, is not a competition and is not tied to any conditions. Rather, it is an award, an incentive and support for a young career and an investment in artistic creation. Pianist Rudolf Buchbinder is the curator of the award.

The idea of publishing a catalog raisonné of Caroline Charrière's works arose during the cataloging work on the composer's estate between 2022 and 2023 in collaboration with the Association Caroline Charrière. Ultimately, the decisive factor for the creation of the project was the fact that over 50 additional works were found during the inventory of the estate in the Cantonal and University Library, which are not listed in the chronological list of works kept by Caroline Charrière herself (2018).

The catalog of works was also based on the catalog by musical genre compiled by the musicologist Irène Minder-Jeanneret (2021), the catalog of the music publisher Bim and the list of works in the inventory of the Caroline Charrière estate (2023). The catalog contains a total of 199 works, 40 arrangements of works by other composers, 6 miniatures composed for special occasions (birthdays and baptisms) and 40 sketches. Charrière also wrote other pieces for private use, but these are not included in the catalog as they are not intended for the public.

Caroline Charrière (1960 - 2018) was a Swiss composer and conductor. She studied flute and composition in Lausanne, Biel and Manchester and conducted the Fribourg women's choir Chœur de Jade in addition to working as a freelance composer.

More info:
https://www.fr.ch/de/kub/news/caroline-charriere-publikation-des-werkkatalogs

Born in 1974, Philippe Bach studied horn at the Bern University of Music and the Conservatoire de Genève and conducting in Zurich with Johannes Schlaefli and at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester with Sir Mark Elder. From 2006 to 2008 he was Assistant Conductor at the Teatro Real in Madrid and assistant to Jesús López Cobos. From 2008 to 2010, he was First Kapellmeister and Deputy GMD at Theater Lübeck and from 2010 to 2022 General Music Director of the Meininger Hofkapelle. He has been Chief Conductor of the Bern Chamber Orchestra since 2012 and Chief Conductor of the Kammerphilharmonie Graubünden since 2016.

Founded in 2009, the 36-member Fribourg Chamber Orchestra (FKO) performs at the Equilibre Fribourg, the Podium Düdingen and in one of the halls of the CO of the Bulle region. It can also be heard in the music theater season of the NOF - Neue Oper Fribourg and regularly accompanies the projects of numerous vocal ensembles in the region.

The 46-year-old Carmen Kiser grew up in Sarnen, graduated from the cantonal school in Obwalden and studied ethnology, environmental sciences and English literature at the University of Zurich. She also completed a Master's degree in museology at the University of Sydney. She then spent nine years developing and managing history education projects at the Museum Aargau.

From 2018 to 2023, she managed the Museum Bruder Klaus in Sachseln and organized numerous special exhibitions on regional cultural history and contemporary art. More recently, she has completed various further training courses in the fields of cultural management and cultural policy. Since March 2024, she has been working as a project coordinator for the Culture Department of the Canton of Lucerne. Carmen Kiser lives with her family in Sarnen.

Andreas Staier was born in Göttingen in 1955. He studied piano and harpsichord in Hanover and Amsterdam and became harpsichordist with the ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln. He has worked as a freelance soloist and as a harpsichord and fortepiano soloist since 1986. He has been an Associate Artist of the Dijon Opera since September 2011.

In recognition of special services to the work of Johann Sebastian Bach, the Lord Mayor of the City of Leipzig awards the Bach Medal annually as part of the Bach Festival. The jury for the award of the Bach Medal of the City of Leipzig is made up of the Gewandhauskapellmeister, the Rector of the Leipzig University of Music and Theater "Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy", the Thomaskantor, the President and the Director of the Bach Archive. The first recipients from 2003 onwards were Gustav Leonhardt, Helmuth Rilling, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Ton Koopman and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Noah Kim studied at the National University in Seoul and worked as part of the Zurich Opera House's young talent program in productions such as The marked by Franz Schreker, Madama Butterfly, Rigoletto and Il Barbiere di Siviglia roles. He had previously made his debut as Belcore in L'Elisir d'amore at the Seoul Opera and as Masetto in Don Giovanni at the Bregenz Festival.

The International Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition was held at the Vienna Chamber Opera from 1982 to 2012. Since 2013, it has organized qualification and final rounds worldwide as an independent association. The annual competition is held in the opera (and operetta) categories, with singers being judged together. This year's competition took place in Latvia.

On June 19, the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw) will present the Herta & Kurt Blaukopf Award for outstanding dissertations at the university for the third time. Irena Müller-Brozović will be honored for her dissertation "The Concert as Resonance Space". The award-winner is head of the MA Music Pedagogy minor at Bern University of the Arts (HKB).

The dissertation "The concert as a resonance space" focuses on resonance-affine music mediation through intensive experience and involvement. Irena Müller-Brozović investigated how music educators can promote musical involvement in concert situations with strong musical experiences and places this in a theoretical framework. The publication was co-financed by the HKB and is published by transcript Verlag.

The Herta & Kurt Blaukopf Award is presented for special achievements in the context of scientific doctoral studies and serves to make special achievements visible.

Hardmeier will fulfill this role together with Matthias Arter, the ensemble's oboist. Matthias Arter has been responsible for the artistic direction since the end of 2020, until summer 2022 together with Susanne Peters.

Andri Hardmeier headed the music department of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia from 2011 to 2022. Since 2004, he has worked as a concert and opera dramaturge at various leading theatres and festivals, including the Theater Freiburg, the Hanover State Opera, the Ruhrtriennale and the Salzburg and Bayreuth Festivals.

He holds a Master's degree in Theoretical Physics and a Master of Advanced Studies in Cultural Management. Last year, he worked in an advisory capacity on an analysis of the CNZ by the consulting firm Metrum GmbH and thus got to know the CNZ better.

Born in 1965 Jan Schultszinitially studied horn and piano in his home city of Amsterdam as well as in Basel and Lausanne and played as a horn player in various orchestras. At the beginning of the 1990s, he trained as a conductor with Manfred Honeck, Ralf Weikert and Ilya Musin in St. Petersburg. He lives in Basel, where he is a professor at the University of Music. As a guest conductor, he mainly leads orchestras in Switzerland, Holland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, China and South America.

He was Kapellmeister at the Norske Opera in Oslo, conducted the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest and the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Liège. For 10 years he was Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Orchestre de Chambre de Neuchâtel. In 2000, he founded the Opera St. Moritz and was its Artistic Director until 2012. He has been artistic director of the Engadin Festival since 2008 and artistic director of the Schubertiade Riehen since 2022.

At the same time as the election of the Chief Conductor, the Board of the CMB the position of Principal Guest Conductor will be filled for the first time, also from the 24/25 season. Benjamin Reiners, outgoing General Music Director of the state capital Kiel and future Chief Conductor of the Robert Schumann Philharmonie Chemnitz and GMD of Theater Chemnitz, will take on this role.

Both amateur and professional dancers are more compatible than the rest of the population and are characterized by a high degree of openness and extraversion. Previous studies have found that this also applies to musicians. However, the MPIEA team also found an interesting difference between the two groups: in contrast to musicians, dancers are not more neurotic, but - on the contrary - less neurotic than people who do not dance.

In cooperation with the director of a dance school in Freiburg and the dance director at the Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern, the MPIEA team analyzed data from 5435 people from Sweden and 574 people from Germany. The Big Five personality profiles openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism were examined. The study results were recently published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences published.

Original article:
Christensen, J. F., Wesseldijk, L., Mosing, M., Fayn, K., Schmidt, E., Blattmann, M., Sancho-Escanero, L., & Ullén, F. (2024). The Dancer Personality: Comparing Dancers and Non-Dancers in Germany and Sweden. Personality and Individual Differences, 112603. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2024.112603

Last season, only 7.5% of works performed in orchestral concert halls were by women. This is a slight decrease compared to the previous year (7.7 percent). Of the works performed, 5.8 percent were by white women and 1.6 percent by women from the global majority: Black women (0.59 percent), Asian women (0.5 percent), women of mixed race (0.40 percent), Indigenous women (0.07 percent) and women from the Middle East (0.02 percent).

The report by Donne - Women in Music analyzed the repertoire of 111 orchestras in 30 countries for the 2023-2024 season. It builds on an annual survey that began in 2018 and identifies trends in diversity and equality programming in the global concert repertoire.

Link to the report:
https://donne-uk.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/DonneReport2024.pdf

Nuit Incolore was born in Vietnam in 2001 under the real name Théo Marclay and grew up in Saxon. His song "Dépassé" became the diamond single in France and was therefore selected for French television channel TF1's Chanson of the Year 2023. Nuit Incolore also won the French-language Discovery of the Year category at the NRJ Music Awards 2023, the first Swiss artist to win the award since its inception. In 2024, he was nominated in the "Victoires de la musique" in the male discovery category. As part of his tour this year, he will be performing at Sion sous les étoiles, the Paléo Festival and the Olympia.

Ella van der Woude was born in Sion in 1987. At the age of 18, she moved to Holland, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts at the Amsterdam Conservatory in 2010 and a Master of Music in film music composition in 2014. In addition to compositions for the cinema, she released the album "Solo Piano" in 2020. In October 2022, she was the first woman ever to receive the Dutch "Golden Calf" award, an equivalent to the French César, for the best film music for "Moloch" by Nico van den Brink. In May 2024, the film "Armand" by Norwegian director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, for which she produced the soundtrack, won the prize for Best Sound Creation and the Golden Camera at the Cannes Film Festival.

Hubert Hazebroucq is a French dancer, choreographer and researcher specializing in Renaissance and Baroque dance. He discovered historical dance as a contemporary dancer in Lyon in 1998 and has since performed for various choreographers such as Christine Bayle (Cie L'Éclat des Muses), Marie-Geneviève Massé (Cie L'Éventail), Lieven Baert and Sigrid T'Hooft. He was trained in Italian Renaissance dance by Barbara Sparti and Gloria Giordano.

As a choreographer, his aim is to present old repertoires with live music and to bring together creation, emotion and research in historically informed performance. His dance company Les Corps Éloquents, founded in 2008 and based in Paris, collaborates with renowned ensembles, in particular Les Arts Florissants under the direction of William Christie for Molière et ses musiques 2022 (Versailles, Philharmonie de Paris,...).

More info:
https://www.fhnw.ch/de/die-fhnw/hochschulen/musik/die-schola-cantorum-basiliensis/aktuelles/dozent_fuer_renaissance_tanz_hubert_hazebroucq