Tonight, 5.05pm, on WDR: a special on “Musik gegen alle Fronten”, the latest production of the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. Listen live.

Performances of Ernst Krenek’s three one act operas Der Diktator, Das geheime Königreich and Schwergewicht oder Die Ehre der Nation will take place on 31 January and on 1 and 3 February.

Marc Minkowski, Arvo Pärt and Matthias Schulz of the Stiftung Mozarteum at the dress rehearsal for yesterday’s world première of Swan Song at the Großes Festspielhaus in Salzburg.

A recording of the concert will be broadcast by Ö1 on 9 February at 11:03am. Listen live.

View the full study score of Swan Song.

Arvo Pärt: Swan Song
Wiener Philharmoniker, cond. Marc Minkowski
Mozart Week Salzburg; recording of the world première on 29 January, Großes Festspielhaus Salzburg
Ö1 | Listen live
Sunday, 09.02.2014, 11:03

Here is an excerpt from a (German) interview with Jay Schwartz. The interview was conducted last December by Bernd Künzig for SWR2.

SWR2 will broadcast a recording of the composer’s upcoming Delta – Music for Orchestra IV on 8 February at 8pm, three hours after the its world première. Listen live.

Dennis Russell Davies and Arvo Pärt with the Bruckner Orchestra Linz at today’s rehearsals for Pärt’s Symphony No. 4 ‘Los Angeles’.

The piece will be performed today at the Brucknerhaus in Linz and on 31 January at the Musikverein, Vienna.

Arvo Pärt: Symphony No. 4 ‘Los Angeles’
for string orchestra, harp, timpani and percussion | 34'
timp, perc(2–4), hp, str
27.01.2014, Brucknerhaus, Linz
31.01.2014, Musikverein, Vienna
Bruckner Orchestra Linz, cond. Dennis Russell Davies

Victor Ibarra’s piano piece Cuatro observaciones sobre lo imaginario, which won the Mauricio Kagel Composition Competition (K2013) in 2013, will be performed on 3 February at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, on 14 March at the Fundación Eutherpe in León, on 4 April at the Real Academia de España in Rome and on 11 April at the Conservatorio Profesional de Música Cristóbal de Morales in Sevilla.

Find out more about the Mexican composer on his website.

Cuatro observaciones sobre lo imaginario and three other works that participated in the competition were published in Universal Edition’s UE36026.

Congratulations to Arvo Pärt and Tõnu Kaljuste: Adam's Lament (released under the ECM New Series) has won the Grammy for Best Choral Performance. The performers on the recording are the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Vox Clamantis, Sinfonietta Riga, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, soloists Tui Hirv and Rainer Vilu.

Our first newsletter of 2014 is out. Read the whole newsletter by clicking the picture to the right or go here.

You can subscribe to our newsletter, which is available in German and in English, here.

Here is a high resolution sketch of Jay Schwartz’ Delta – Music for Orchestra IV. The piece will be premièred at the Eclat festival on 8 February. Johannes Kalitzke conducts the RSO Stuttgart.

SWR2 broadcasts the concert on 8 February at 8pm, three hours after the performance. Listen live.

View the full study score.

Jay Schwartz: Delta – Music for Orchestra IV
for orchestra | 25'
4 4 4 4 - 6 4 4 1 - Kontrabass (5-stringed), perc(3), vln.I, vln.II, vla, vc
world prem. 08.02.2014, Theaterhaus, Stuttgart; RSO Stuttgart, cond. Johannes Kalitzke

Universal Edition mourns the death of Claudio Abbado, a conductor who made a great contribution to the acceptance of the Second Viennese School, most significantly in Vienna itself. As a founder of Vienna’s Wien Modern festival in 1988, he created an independent forum for the music of the 20th century.

Beyond his focus on the music of Schönberg, Berg and Webern – whose music was central to the first festival – and Mahler (Vienna’s influence on his own understanding of Mahler is reflected in our interview, see below), Abbado also showed great interest in his own contemporaries. The Lucerne Concert Hall was inaugurated in 1998 with a concert by Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra with a performance of Wolfgang Rihm’s IN-SCHRIFT.

Abbado’s championship of modern music will remain an example to us.

Tomorrow, 18 January, BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now will broadcast a recording of the London première of Georg Friedrich Haas’ in vain.

The concert was performed by the London Sinfonietta under Emilio Pomàrico on 6 December 2013 at the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise Festival.

Furthermore, Tom Service will present an interview with the composer.

The show will be online until 26 January, listen on BBC Radio 3.

In the 13th installment of our blog about Luke Bedford's new opera, Through His Teeth, he tells us about the latest scene.

“The scene I’m currently working on, scene 13, is kind of a bit like a showdown, although I don’t really want to use that word. But it is the sort of point where the various plots come together.

The scene is about five or six minutes long. It actually has a bass drum, which starts very slowly, but is almost imperceptibly getting faster over the course of about five minutes.

So at the beginning it’s only playing every couple of seconds, it’s just this very distant sort of thud. And as the scene builds up, you might become gradually aware of this kind of undercurrent, there’s something pulling you, as you move towards the key moment at the end of the scene. And I like this idea. A lot of the scene is very quiet, there are long pauses between what is said.

The text is actually quite short, it’s barely a side of A4. And this is something that is quite interesting about the pacing of things: sometimes you need gaps there, so that the music can spell out the tension in a scene.”

UE joins the PLG Young Artists Series 2014 today at the Southbank Centre in London.

Highlights of today’s programme are the world première of Vykintas Baltakas' new work Redditio 2 (see the full score), and a personal appearance by Cristóbal Hallfter, on a rare visit to the country.

Luke Bedford talks about scenes one and two of his new opera Through His Teeth. 

Part 9 of our continuing blog about the composition of Luke Bedford's opera Through His Teeth.

Did you start with scene 1 and work your way towards the last scene? How did you start writing?

I haven’t written the piece in chronological order at all, I didn’t start with scene 1 and finish with scene 10. I started at scene 9 I think, then I went to scene 2, then scene 1, and, having set those almost sort of boundaries of the piece, I then started kind of connecting the ones in the middle.

Also I kind of focused on what seemed to me the more important scenes. Obviously every scene is important in its own way, but some scenes are bigger sort of structural moments, or simply just longer. And I wanted to get some of those bigger ones out of the way earlier in the piece, so that if things became tight, at the end of the writing process, I wouldn’t be working on the very key moments, they’d already be done – so that was almost like my insurance policy.

Could you give us examples of such scenes?

One of the crucial scenes is obviously the first time A and R meet, as that scene establishes their relationship. Then there’s a scene in a restaurant where it looks like A is going to leave him, and you have to see his ingenuity, he has to come up with some reason why she can’t, and he has to do it very quickly. And he tells a huge lie basically, an almost unbelievable lie. But he does it in such a way, that if she doubted him, she would think “Well, this guy must be mad, why would he say this to me?” So she is in a way forced to believe him.