The actress Ursina Lardi will be honored with the Chur Culture Prize 2024, endowed with 8,000 francs. In addition to Estrada, performer Martha Mutapay and the collective Piera Buchli & Luc Isenschmid will also receive a sponsorship award. The recognition and sponsorship prizes are endowed with CHF 4,000 each.

The bass clarinettist Marc Lardon was born in Chur. He is co-founder and director of Soundhund - a concert series for improvised and experimental music in Chur. After studying in Chur and Amsterdam, he is active as a performer and improviser. He is currently pursuing solo projects and is part of the duos Splitter (with Andreas Glauser, Zurich), Pol (with Daniel Sailer, Graubünden) and Kontrabach (also with Daniel Sailer).

Christian Klucker is a freelance choir conductor. He teaches at the Bündner Kantonsschule and conducts the vocal ensemble incantanti. In 2019, Klucker was a guest conductor at the Basel University of Music and is still a guest conductor with the Swiss Youth Choir. He was also awarded a special prize for best conductor at the international choir competition in Assisi in 2017.

Jamira Estrada, born 1998 in Chur, lives and works as a composer, performer of electronic music and DJ in Zurich. While currently completing her bachelor's degree in electroacoustic composition and classical music at the Zurich University of the Arts, Jamira is working on her own projects and collaborating with various artists from different disciplines such as visual arts, film and dance.

The canton writes in the explanatory report that music schools are currently only barely regulated in the Education Act. They are managed and financed independently by the local communities. These regulate the employment of music school teachers, the cost sharing of parents or the organizational allocation of the music school itself. During the drafting of the bill, various options for increased coordination were examined with the music school directors and in the project committees.

Due to the different starting positions of the municipalities, the canton intends to retain the current model. The employment conditions for music school teachers are now to be standardized at cantonal level, for which a separate draft (school staff ordinance or extended teaching staff ordinance) will be drawn up.

More info: https://www.ow.ch/aktuellesinformationen/113116

The survey is being conducted for the first time. The 5,000 people contacted by post can complete the questionnaire online. Participation is voluntary. The evaluation is anonymous. It is not possible to draw conclusions about the individual person. The sample is selected randomly from the population register. The survey is conducted by Interface Politikstudien on behalf of the Basel-Stadt Department of Culture. 10 museum passes will be raffled off among the participants in the survey.

The population's assessment will be incorporated into the development of the new cultural mission statement. With the cantonal cultural mission statement, the cantonal government sets out the cultural policy guidelines for the years 2026 to 2031. Another basis is a comprehensive impact analysis that retrospectively examines the implementation of the cultural mission statement from 2020 to 2025. The results will be published as part of Basel-Stadt's new cultural mission statement.

Co-operative Director and Chief Conductor of the Opera Nicholas Carter will step down in summer 2025 after four years in Bern. The Russian conductor Alevtina Ioffe has been appointed as the opera's new chief conductor from summer 2025. Her contract begins in summer 2025 and is initially for four years. She has lived in Berlin since 2022 and conducts regularly at the Komische Oper Berlin, Staatstheater Stuttgart and Gothenburg Opera.

With the new ballet production On the move she introduced herself to the Zurich Opera House audience in December 2022. Born in Moscow, Alevtina Ioffe studied choral conducting, classical singing and piano and graduated from the Moscow Conservatory under Vladimir Ponkin. For ten years, until 2021, she was music director of the State Opera and Ballet Theater for Young Audiences "Natalia Sats" in Moscow. Between February 2021 and July 2022 she was Music Director of the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg.

By the end of February 2024, Bühnen Bern had already recorded around 14,000 more admissions than at the same time last year. This significantly exceeds even the pre-corona level, according to the press release.

Michael Boder, born in Darmstadt in 1958, began his career as assistant to Michael Gielen at the Frankfurt Opera. From 2008 to 2012, he was music director at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, and from 2012 to 2016, he was chief conductor of the Royal Danish Theater and the Royal Copenhagen Orchestra. He is considered a specialist in 20th and 21st century music and has conducted world premieres of works by Georg Friedrich Haas, Friedrich Cerha, Hans Werner Henze, Krzysztof Penderecki, Manfred Trojahn and Aribert Reimann, among others.

The trio studies with Claudio Martínez Mehner. Winning the competition includes their debut at Wigmore Hall on June 19, 2024 as well as further appearances at festivals and concert series in the UK. Ayla Şahin, the violinist of the trio, studies with Rainer Schmidt and Alina Pogostkina, Finn Mannion (cello) with Danjulo Ishizaka and pianist Mar Valor with Zoltán Fejérvári.

Founded in 1910, the Royal Over-Seas League is a non-profit private members' club. Established in 1952, its annual ROSL music competition offers prizes worth more than £75,000. The competition is open to nationals of the UK, current and former Commonwealth countries, the USA, all EU and EEA countries and Switzerland. At least one member of an ensemble must be from the UK or Commonwealth.

Measures were identified and developed during the preparation of the candidature. For example, actions are planned to improve the networking of the yodelling world throughout Switzerland. New training and further education courses are to be developed and young talent promoted. Measures are also planned to raise public awareness, better document the tradition and expand research into this singing practice.

Yodelling is widespread in Switzerland and enjoys unbroken popularity, writes the Federal Department of Home Affairs. The tradition is passed on in very different ways: within families, in yodeling clubs and at schools or simply among singers.

Most of the more than 12,000 yodellers in Switzerland belong to one of the 780 groups of the Swiss Yodelling Association. Yodelling is also performed informally and spontaneously outside of this organization. Yodelling is a very lively tradition that is also inspiring more and more professional musicians to reinterpret the song in their compositions.

More info:
https://www.bak.admin.ch/bak/de/home/aktuelles/nsb-news.msg-id-100587.html

Born in Trier, guitarist and composer Henrik Dewes studied guitar in Basel with Pablo Márquez, Andreas von Wangenheim and Maurizio Grandinetti as well as composition with Johannes Caspar Walter and Bettina Skrzypczak. He also completed a teaching degree in school music and German studies in Karlsruhe. He performs regularly as a duo with Tobias Klich and with the singer Cosima Büsing. He also performs with Borsch4Breakfast across the diverse styles of Eastern European music. His latest ensemble Metafora performs classical romantic orchestral pieces in a special way: "Umverpackt" arranged for guitars, cello and clarinet. As a lecturer, Henrik Dewes teaches guitar at the Zurich and Basel Universities of Teacher Education in the field of music, specializing in instrumental pedagogy.

Since its founding in 1975, the German Music Competition has been the national competition with the broadest range of support for young professional musicians. It is one of a total of 13 funding projects of the German Music Council and is held annually in alternating categories between Bonn and another German city.

Igor Ozim was born in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in 1931 and studied with Max Rostal in London, where he also won the Carl Flesch Prize in 1951. He won the ARD competition in 1953. As one of the most sought-after violin teachers in Europe and worldwide, he taught at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, the Hochschule für Musik in Bern and, from 2002, at the Mozarteum Salzburg.

His repertoire includes around 60 violin concertos and numerous chamber music works. Many contemporary compositions that he has premiered are dedicated to him. His concerts have brought him together with major international orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the BBC Orchestra and numerous radio orchestras. His students in Bern include Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Gwendolyn Masin and Primož Novšak.

The team, involving the Max Planck Institutes for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main and for Psycholinguistics (MPI-PL) in Nijmegen, has calculated an indicator for the genetic predisposition to a certain trait or behaviour, in this case for beat synchronization. The aim was to use the example to show how difficult it is to make genetic predictions for someone who lived over 200 years ago. Interestingly, the composer showed an unremarkable indicator of musicality compared to population samples from the Swedish Karolinska Institute and Vanderbilt University in the US.

According to the team, the large discrepancy between the DNA-based prediction and Beethoven's musical genius is a valuable lesson: it shows that one should be skeptical when someone claims that a genetic test can reliably determine whether a child will be particularly gifted in music or in another area.

Original publication:
Wesseldijk, L. W., Henechowicz, T. L., Baker, D. J., Bignardi, G., Karlsson, R., Gordon, R. L., Mosing, M. A., Ullén, F., & Fisher, S. E. (2024). Notes from Beethoven's Genome. Current Biology, 34(6), R233-R234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.01.025

According to the Schola Cantorum, Xavier Díaz-Latorre was born in Barcelona. Between 1985 and 1992, he won several international prizes as a classical guitarist in France and Spain. In 1993, he completed his studies in guitar with Oscar Ghiglia at the Musikhochschule Basel. His interest in early music led him to study lute with Hopkinson Smith at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. He also completed several courses in choral conducting and a postgraduate course in orchestral conducting.

From 1996 to 2005 he was active in the field of baroque opera. He has also collaborated with the Fundación del Siglo de Oro, composing and producing music for the theater. He leads his own vocal and instrumental ensemble, Laberintos Ingeniosos, which specializes in the performance of music from Spain's Golden Age and also releases recordings.

Xavier Díaz-Latorre is currently a permanent professor of lute, basso continuo and chamber music at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) and lute teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. He is a regular lecturer at the LSA (Lute Society of America) in Cleveland (Ohio), at the Amherst Early Music Festival (Connecticut) and at the Franz Liszt University of Music Weimar and has given lectures and master classes throughout Europe, the USA, South America, Japan and Korea.

The 55-year-old music manager has been responsible for program planning at the Basel Symphony Orchestra (SOB) for eleven years and has "contributed significantly to the artistic profile and international perception of the orchestra", writes the orchestra. Clever program planning, the development of innovative concert formats and forms of communication characterized by a spirit of artistic discovery during the Stadtcasino renovation, during the pandemic and after the reopening of the Musiksaal have received great recognition far beyond Basel's borders.

The Basel Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1997 from the merger of the Basel Symphony Orchestra and the Basel Radio Symphony Orchestra. After a phase of reorientation, it separated from its long-standing organizer AMG in 2012 and has since been performing under its own artistic and entrepreneurial responsibility. British conductor Ivor Bolton has been its chief conductor since the 2016/2017 season.

Musicologist Hans-Georg Hofmann was dramaturge and press spokesman for the Basel Chamber Orchestra from 2002 to 2012. From 2008 to 2014, he also directed the festival Schweizgenössisch at Radialsystem Berlin.

Gaudenz has been General Music Director of the Jena Philharmonic Orchestra, Thuringia's largest concert orchestra, since the 2018/19 season. After his first positions as Principal Conductor of the Collegium Musicum Basel and previously as a founding member and Artistic Director of the camerata variabile basel, he was appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the Odense Symphony Orchestra in 2010. This was followed in 2012 by his appointment as Principal Conductor of the long-established chamber orchestra Hamburger Camerata.

Founded in 1934 as the Jena Municipal Symphony Orchestra, the Jena Philharmonic Orchestra was given its current name in 1969. Under the then chief conductor Günter Blumhagen, who worked in Jena from 1967 to 1980, the orchestra was also increased to its current size. Blumhagen's successors as General Music Director were Christian Ehwald (1981-1988), Andreas S. Weiser (1990-1998), Andrey Boreyko (1998-2004), Nicholas Milton (2004-2011) and Marc Tardue (2011-2017), before Simon Gaudenz took over the direction of the orchestra in the 2018/19 season.

Eve-Maud Hubeaux was born in Geneva and studied piano at the Lausanne Conservatory before beginning her vocal studies there. She began her international career in the opera studio of the Opéra National du Rhin after completing a master's degree in contract law at the Université de Savoie. She has won numerous competitions, including the International Belvedere Competition (2013) and the 5th International Renata Tebaldi Competition.

The Herbert von Karajan Prize, which has been awarded as part of the Salzburg Easter Festival since 2017, honors outstanding artistic achievements that have received worldwide recognition. Since 2023, the prize has been awarded to three artists, each endowed with 16,000 euros. In addition to Eve-Maud Hubeaux, this year's winners are Lise Davidsen and Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha.

Together with Marc Stucki and Benedikt Reising, Schaerer founded the Jazzwerkstatt Bern in 2007, a collective that brings together musicians and composers from different stylistic and geographical backgrounds. As a singer, he tours extensively around the world with various projects of his own. Most notably with his sextet Hildegard Lernt Fliegen. At the Bern University of the Arts, he teaches jazz and contemporary music in the bachelor's program and music composition in the master's program.

As a composer, he regularly writes commissioned works for classical ensembles and contemporary formations in addition to music for his own projects. In 2004 and 2005 he wrote two first string quartets, and in 2015 Schaerer's first symphonic work The Big Wig premiered by the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra (founded by Pierre Boulez) at the Lucerne Festival.

The French Académie du Jazz was founded in 1954 by Jean Cocteau and André Hodeir. It awards several prizes. In 2023, under the chairmanship of Jean-Michel Proust, the number of prizes was reduced to seven in view of the Academy's 70th anniversary this year.