Over the past three weeks, ten up-and-coming conductors have had the opportunity to work with the Gstaad Festival Orchestra and the Biel Solothurn Symphony Orchestra as part of the Gstaad Conducting Academy. Under the direction of Jaap van Zweden, Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Principal Guest Conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and Johannes Schlaefli, Professor of Conducting at the Zurich University of the Arts, they led numerous rehearsals and concerts.

At the final concert, three of this year's ten participants were awarded the Neeme Järvi Prize: Chinese conductor Yukuang Jin will conduct as a guest conductor with the Philharmonie Südwestfalen in an upcoming season. Anna Sułkowska-Migoń will be invited to conduct the Bern Symphony Orchestra, Musikkollegium Winterthur and Sinfonie Orchester Biel Solothurn thanks to her win. The German conductor Aurel Dawidiuk wins a guest conducting position with the Basel Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre de chambre de Lausanne and the Biel Solothurn Symphony Orchestra.

The jury for the Neeme Järvi Prize 2023 was made up of the Chairman Christoph Müller (Artistic Director Gstaad Menuhin Festival & Academy), the professors of the Gstaad Conducting Academy Jaap van Zweden and Johannes Schlaefli, two representatives of the Gstaad Festival Orchestra (Vlad Stančuleasa, concertmaster and Polina Peskina, 1st flute), as well as representatives of the partner orchestras.

Born in 1960, Florence Malgoire was the daughter of Jean-Claude Malgoire, the founder and director of the baroque ensemble La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy. She studied at the Courneuve Conservatory and with Sigiswald Kuijken and played in numerous renowned ensembles such as Philippe Herrewegh's La Chapelle Royale, William Christie's Les Arts Florissants and Marc Minkowski's Les Musiciens du Louvre. She has performed as a soloist with Les Arts Florissants and the Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy.

Since 2000, she has taught baroque violin and chamber music at the Haute Ecole de Musique Geneva. She has also appeared as conductor of the baroque orchestra L'orchestre baroque du Leman. In 2008 she was invited by William Christie to help set up a department for historical performance practice at the Julliard School.

Hanna Walsdorf has been Assistant Professor of Musicology in Basel since 2022. In the project "The Night Side of Music", she will investigate how the segmented sleep cycle shaped the history of music in the early modern period between 1500 and 1800. She will look at religious music-making at home and musical practice in monastic daily routines, as well as night-time concerts and private musical events. Finally, she also asks how the time between sunset and sunrise was reflected in the music itself. Walsdorf's aim with this research is to contribute to a reassessment of musical behavior and repertoire.

With the SNSF Advanced Grants, the SNSF supports outstanding scientists in Switzerland who take unconventional approaches to gain new insights. The approved projects are each funded with more than two million francs over a period of five years.

The SNSF Advanced Grants were launched in 2021 to provide researchers at Swiss institutions with a replacement for the ERC Advanced Grants, for which they cannot currently apply, as Switzerland is now only considered a non-associated third country in the EU research program "Horizon Europe".

Originally from Turkey, Cansu Tanrıkulu studied in Berlin and has since worked regularly with renowned representatives of international contemporary jazz, including musicians such as Liz Kosack, Korhan Erel, Jim Black, William Parker and Nick Dunston. Tanrıkulu's work is "not only firmly rooted in the jazz tradition, but also highly topical", writes the HKB.

Originally from Bulgaria, Biliana Voutchkova is a performer, composer and violinist who is equally at home in real-time music, various forms of improvised music and contemporary classical music. She has worked extensively with visual arts, theater and dance and performs with long-standing projects such as her solo project Jane in Ether (with Miako Klein and Magda Mayas), the Splitter Orchestra and as a duo with clarinettist Michael Thieke.

The two will take up their posts at the BUA next September.

According to the Basel-Stadt cantonal press release, platforms that provide services for youth and alternative culture in close proximity to the scene and at low cost can also submit applications. Following the pilot project in 2022, the research grants will be used to realize another key concern of cultural professionals. Both calls for proposals will be financed from the cultural lump sum, which was increased by the Grand Council in June.

The tipping initiative approved by the people demands that at least five percent of the canton's regular cultural budget - symbolically: the tip - should flow into Basel's youth and alternative culture every year. An important concern of the cultural scene is being met with the call for proposals launched today for non-commercial exhibition and project spaces in Basel: they can now apply for funding of between 10,000 and 50,000 francs for their programs, for a maximum of three years. The prerequisite is that they are also financed by third-party funds.

More info:
Canton of Basel-Stadt and City of Basel - New funding vehicles for a strong Basel youth and alternative culture

Suisseculture notes the submission of the 200-franc-is-enough initiative "with unease". Although the Swiss voted down the No Billag initiative by 71.6 percent just five years ago, this is already the next attack on media diversity, writes the association.

Swiss radio and television are an important and necessary forum for cultural creation in all sectors. Art and culture are dependent on independent media, "independent of the dominance of market mechanisms". In order to reflect the diversity of Switzerland and its cultural activities, a breadth is needed that only the SRG media can offer with its mission for society and its cohesion.

The whole statement:
https://www.suisseculture.ch/?article=brandgefaehrliche_no_billag_2_initiative_eingereicht

Nowak is Principal Associate Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London. From 2017 to 2020 he was Music Director of the Polish National Opera in Warsaw. He was the winner of the Ernest Ansermet Conducting Competition in Geneva and received the European Music Prize for the European Musician of the Year, awarded by a commission chaired by Pierre Boulez. He has held conducting positions with several orchestras in Switzerland.

The Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in 1973 as the CCP Philharmonic Orchestra. It has also performed with artists such as Van Cliburn and Renata Tebaldi. It toured Europe in 2001.

Hankyeol Yoon was awarded the Neeme Järvi Prize in 2019 as the youngest winner of the Gstaad Menuhin Festival and received invitations from the Basel Chamber Orchestra and the symphony orchestras in Basel and Bern. In 2022/23, he made his debut with the Bern Symphony Orchestra and the Busan Philharmonic Orchestra and assisted Simon Rattle on a European tour of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

He was engaged as assistant conductor at the Grand Théâtre de Genève and worked as a scholarship holder under Daniel Harding and Thomas Adès. He has also received awards as a composer. He was a member of the mentoring program of the Eötvös Foundation for Contemporary Music in Budapest and was artistically supervised by George Benjamin, while Peter Eötvös performed his compositions. He made his debut as a conductor and composer under Unsuk Chin at the Tongyeong International Music Festival. His most recent work Grande Hipab was premiered by Ensemble Modern in 2021.

With regard to "open houses", Theater Basel and the Nationaltheater Mannheim are in the lead with three mentions each. Theater Basel is praised for taking the Open Foyer seriously.

The opera premiere "Berlin Alexanderplatz" at the Theater Bielefeld and the multi-genre project "vendetta, vendetta" at the Staatstheater Nürnberg win with two mentions each. In terms of stage/costume/video/sound, the Zurich Schauspielhaus is in the lead with six nominations.

The inglorious winner of the question of the greatest moment of excitement is, unsurprisingly, the feces attack by the now suspended head of the Hanover State Ballet against a dance critic.

More info: https://www.die-deutsche-buehne.de/leseprobe/saisonbilanz-2022-23/

Paavo Järvi will conduct the opening concert of the Summer Festival on August 11 and the concert on August 12, his first time conducting the orchestra. Both concert programs remain unchanged. On August 16, Andrés Orozco-Estrada will conduct, and in the second half of the concert, the Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz will replace Sergei Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 1 in D minor. In the first half, as recently announced, Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini op. 43 will be performed with soloist Beatrice Rana. According to the Lucerne Festival press release, tickets remain valid.

Riccardo Chailly has been Chief Conductor of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra since 2016. He conducts three to four concerts during each Festival summer, plus a three-day spring residency from 2022. Numerous performances are now available on DVD or CD; the most recent releases include orchestral works by Richard Strauss (2019) and the first part of Lucerne's Rachmaninov cycle (2020).

Pictures published by the Afghan government showed, according to The Strad burning instruments, including guitars, a harmonium and an amplification system. Aziz al-Rahman al-Muhajir, the head of the Afghan "Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice", explains in Herat that the promotion of music leads to "moral corruption".

Since taking power in August 2021, the Taliban have continuously issued laws and regulations that reflect a radical interpretation of Islam, including a ban on playing music in public. The militant group had already imposed a ban on music during its last reign in the late 1990s.

Stanley Chia-Ming Dodds was born in Canada, grew up in Australia and now lives in Berlin as a German-Australian dual citizen. He began playing the violin and piano in Adelaide at the age of four, attended the Bruckner Conservatory and the Musikgymnasium in Linz before studying at the Lucerne Conservatory. He continued his violin studies at the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic and was accepted into the orchestra as a violinist in 1994. He studied conducting in Australia, Switzerland and Germany.

His recordings of works by Wolfgang Rihm with musicians from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were nominated in the "Conductor of the Year" category at the German Opus Classic Awards 2022. Other important productions include Martón Illés' Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatschinskaya and the Karajan Academy Orchestra.

The Sydney Youth Orchestra (SYO) offers young musicians, from beginners to pre-professional musicians, the opportunity to socialize, create music and advocate for orchestral music. Musicians can audition each year and are placed in orchestras and ensembles best suited to their level of development. The SYO offers orchestral training to musicians between the ages of 6 and 25.

For the project, scores and films in libraries and film archives in Germany, Italy, France and the USA will be examined from April 2024. The main focus will be on music that was newly and specially composed to increase the prestige of individual films.

The researchers led by Oliver Huck from the Institute for Historical Musicology at the University of Hamburg assume that music represents a separate, partially complementary level of storytelling in dramaturgical terms. With their research, they want to gain fundamental insights into the musical aesthetics and musical framework of silent film. They assume that conventions of musical dramaturgy and audiovisual perception were already established before the sound film and continue to have an effect on today's music.

Huck's project is being funded with 750,000 euros as part of the Reinhart Koselleck Program of the German Research Foundation.

The Award for Marketing + Architecture has been announced for the eighth time. It honors companies, institutions, planning offices and clients who "use architecture as a marketing tool in a high-quality manner". Under the leadership of Judit Solt, editor-in-chief of the Schweizerische Bauzeitung, the jury is made up of advertisers such as Frank Bodin as well as architects and cultural entrepreneurs, including ZHdK lecturer Basil Rogger.

The Künstlerhaus Boswil has been nominated alongside four other buildings in the category of public buildings, sports facilities, hospitals, railroad stations, school buildings and cultural buildings. The award recognizes the preservation of a listed outbuilding belonging to the Künstlerhaus. Users are provided with a modern, bright building that can be "experienced right up to the ridge" thanks to a new staircase in the cleared tenn.

More info: https://www.marketingarchitektur.ch/

As announced by the German Music Industry Association (BVMI), sales of streams, CDs, downloads and vinyl totaled 1.056 billion euros from January to June inclusive, an increase of 6.6 percent compared to the same period last year (H1 2022: 990 million euros according to the full-year financial statements for 2022). Demand for physical sound storage media was at a similar level to the same period of the previous year and thus remained stable (-0.8%). CDs (-4.1%) contributed 11.2% to total sales, while vinyl achieved a market share of 6.0% following a renewed growth spurt of 6.3%. And contrary to the long-term trend, sales of DVDs/Blu-rays rose slightly (+0.9%).

Together, CDs, vinyl, DVDs and singles still account for almost a fifth (18.0%) of sales, while the digital market, which gained 8.4%, accounts for a good four-fifths. While revenue from audio streaming increased by 9.7%, downloads fell by 4.9%.