With this decision, the Grand Council is sending out a signal for Basel as a city of music and thus acknowledging the work of recent years and "ultimately also the high capacity utilization figures and continuous increase in concert attendance of the Basel Symphony Orchestra", writes the orchestra. The increase from the 2017/18 season to 2018/19 was around 20 percent.

After the vote, Elisabeth Ackermann, President of the Government, also emphasized "the importance of a standing orchestra (professional orchestra)" and that "the high level of satisfaction of the Basel Theatre with the symphony orchestra" had significantly influenced the unanimous result (with no abstentions or votes against).

With the award, which is endowed with CHF 10,000, Ambrosetti wants to honor personalities who have rendered outstanding services to jazz in Switzerland. They combine "different genres, generations and grooves and speak an open, curious language with playful musicality at the highest level". In addition, they carry Swiss jazz into the world with their extensive international network.

This year's winners are Känzig & Känzig. Anna Känzig reached number 6 in the Swiss charts with her album "Sound and Fury". Now the versatile singer has teamed up with her uncle: Heiri Känzig is one of the leading jazz bassists internationally - he has performed with the Vienna Art Orchestra, Charlie Mariano and Chico Freeman, among others. What Känzig and Känzig have in common is their open musical horizon. For their first joint project, they have chosen the Great American Songbook as their source of inspiration.

The prize will be presented in person by Franco Ambrosetti on July 30 at the Hotel Walther, Via Maistra 215, Pontresina.

The website https://lieder.giigaebank.ch brings around 350 song lyrics from "Ä altä Älpler" to "Zwüscha Bärgä" into the trouser bag - thanks to smartphones. According to the website, these are songs that are often sung at social gatherings in the Muota Valley and Illgau, but whose lyrics are not always remembered correctly. The aim is to preserve the tradition of open singing in the Muota Valley.

This online collection is based on two songbooks, one published in Muotathal in 1979 and the other in Illgau in 1988. The association points out that many of the authors of these songs are unknown and are therefore "in a gray area of copyright law". Individual entries could therefore be deleted on request.

A search function leads to specific song texts, but you can also use the alphabetical index for inspiration.

At the moment texts are available, perhaps audio files will be added at a later date.
 

© Giigäbank Association

Screenshot of the website lieder.giigaebank.ch

Olivera Tičević, Montenegrin soprano, completed her Master's degree in Specialized Music Performance at the HKB with Christan Hilz. She has won numerous competitions. In 2010 and 2013 she was voted the most promising artist of the Baroque Austria Academy, followed by an international career with concerts in Vienna, Stockholm, Heidelberg and Tokyo.

French pianist Valentin Cotton completed his master's degree in interpretation at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris in Michel Dalberto's class. He has won prizes at several international competitions, including first prize at the Concours de France and the Montrond International Competition, as well as the Schenk Prize from the foundation of the same name in Switzerland.

For the first time, however, the other four specializations of the Master's course were also taken into account in the judging process: Music Mediation, Research, New Music and Chamber Music. The music educator and clarinettist Laura Müller was able to assert herself within this reorientation of the competition with a transdisciplinary education project at the Creaviva Children's Museum at the Zentrum Paul Klee.

Every year, HKB students completing their Master's degree in Specialized Music Performance Classical Music perform at a soloist diploma concert. The Sinfonie Orchester Biel Solothurn accompanied this year's concert in Biel under the direction of its chief conductor Kaspar Zehnder. Afterwards, the students with the best overall score in the demanding three-part Master's examination were once again awarded the Eduard Tschumi Prize, each worth CHF 5,000.

Who has ever heard a symphony by Fritz Brun (1878-1959)? You may still recognize his name, as he was chief conductor of the Bernische Musikgesellschaft (now the Bern Symphony Orchestra) for over 30 years. But few people know this: Brun was the most important Swiss symphonist of the early 20th century, although not the most important Swiss composer of his time. Others, such as Arthur Honegger, Frank Martin and Othmar Schoeck, carried more weight. But Fritz Brun was the only one to devote himself primarily and with eminent talent to symphonic music, comparable to Anton Bruckner, for example - even in his underestimated importance. It is to be hoped that this will soon come to an end. The publication of Fritz Brun's complete orchestral works in this recording could provide an impetus for him to finally receive the recognition he deserves. It is true that many Swiss symphony orchestras have performed works by Brun in recent decades, there have also been radio recordings, and some of his symphonies have been released on LP and CD. But it is not without irony that an outsider conductor has had to bring his work to the public's attention, and with two foreign orchestras to boot.

The conductor is Adriano, born Adriano Baumann in Fribourg in 1944. He realized this complete recording with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra in the period 2003-2015. After studying music at the Zurich Conservatory, Adriano worked as a film music composer, editor of Honegger's film music and prompter at the Zurich Opera House. At the suggestion of Ernest Ansermet and Joseph Keilberth, he finally turned to conducting and from then on devoted himself to the interpretation of little-known works under the stage name Adriano, including the film music of Arthur Honegger as well as orchestral works and operas by Ottorino Respighi. He also champions little-performed Swiss composers such as Hermann Suter, Albert Fäsy, Pierre Maurice and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze.
The idea of a complete recording of Fritz Brun's symphonic oeuvre was born in 2002, when Adriano approached Hans Brun, Fritz Brun's son, with a request for financial support for his project. He and subsequently the Brun heirs, now represented by the composer's grandson, Andreas Brun, provided significant support for the ambitious undertaking over the following years.

The result now available is something to be seen (and heard!): a complete recording of Brun's orchestral works comprising eleven CDs. Adriano has combined all of Brun's published works for the ten symphonies, including the Rhapsody for orchestra, the symphonic poem From the Book of Jobthe concertos for piano with orchestra and violoncello with orchestra. Plus the vocal cycles 3 Songs and chants for alto and piano by Othmar Schoeck (orchestrated by Fritz Brun) and Brun's 5 songs for alto and piano - arranged by Adriano for mezzo-soprano and string sextet.

This comprehensive appreciation is a unique achievement that allows us to get to know Brun's oeuvre as a whole. Like many of his composing contemporaries, Brun began in the footsteps of Beethoven, Schumann, Bruckner and Brahms; he developed his style independently in the area of gradually expanding tonality, without ever questioning it. He found his personal musical language as early as 1901 in the First Symphony and remained true to his style until the Tenth, which he composed at the age of 75.

Characteristic of Brun's style are the chamber music structures that loosen up the orchestral flow and give it character, the tangible shaping of large movements and the rich late Romantic harmony. This is particularly evident in the first movement of the Fifth, which Brun himself considered problematic. In movements 2 and 4, he creates virtuoso fugati with twelve-note themes in the free tonal space, as Bartók and Hindemith also did.

This publication is enriched by a recording of the Eighth, which Fritz Brun realized in 1946 as conductor with the Beromünster Studio Orchestra. And the Variations for string orchestra and piano on an original theme can be heard in a recording by the Collegium Musicum Zürich under the direction of Paul Sacher and with Adrian Aeschbacher from the same year.

The lonely shepherd on the beach, waiting for his beloved, blowing on the double reed, calling, lamenting: bucolic associations of this kind run through one's mind from the very first note. Letter from afarwhich György Kurtág wrote in memory of the harpist Ursula Holliger, who died in 2014. Her husband, Heinz Holliger, intones this piece on the oboe in a heartbreakingly elegiac manner. It is no coincidence that we encounter a similar mood several times among the 37 tracks on this CD, in Kurtág's ...a Sappho fragment for example, or in ...(Hommage à Tristan) - The cor anglais appears in Act 3 of the opera. Holliger, for his part, takes up the intense and warm tone. It is often about memories of the deceased, tributes to friends, reminiscences of music history, very touching, calling out, calling after, imploring, lamenting, sometimes in delicate, sometimes in dark colors, in the playing of Holliger and Marie-Lise Schüpbach on oboe and/or cor anglais, and especially when Ernesto Molinari's double bass clarinet joins in. There are also instrumental dialogs and pairings, beautifully performed, with character, precisely drawn.

Dialogues is the title of the CD that the ECM label is dedicating to Holliger on his 80th birthday. Both Holliger's and Kurtág's names appear on the cover. It is a testimony to a long artistic friendship. At first, it may come as a surprise when Holliger says that their compositional styles are similar. Many of the older works seem completely different, and yet the two have grown closer in recent decades. After all, they had the same teacher in Sándor Veress. This very harmonious CD tells the story. And just when you think the whole thing sounds very homogeneous, you discover nuances, mysterious ones. The references become richer and closer. At times, the pieces go back and forth between the two. The Swiss set to music The Ros' by Angelus Silesius, and the Hungarian responds with another setting sung by Sarah Wegener.

Finally, another artist joins the conversation. Poet Philippe Jaccottet recites seven of his poems, which Holliger takes on in a "Lecture pour hautbois et cor anglais". In it, he follows the words, but with each Air a bit further, into the microtonal and in the last piece Oiseaux ... It is music that reaches out into the distance and seeks out a distant horizon.

The title promises a lot: a compendium on improvising and fantasizing in the 17th and 18th centuries, an almost adventurous undertaking, because the claim is high, since we have no direct evidence of this music-making practice from that time: no records and no MP3s, only notes, reports and treatises. However, the organist Markus Schwenkreis and a group of musicians from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Basel Research Group for Improvisation) have in fact compiled some very exciting material: on the suspension of a basso continuo line or a fixed bass framework, on cadenzas and preludes, also on dance suites and fugues, on chorale harmonizations and the interludes between song verses and generally on music as a rhetorical art. A detailed bibliography, a glossary and numerous musical examples are included and appended. For the dead theory is, where possible, also translated into living practice. This is what distinguishes this large-format Compendium of the numerous musicological essays on historical improvisation that have been published in recent years. And that seems to me to be the most adventurous and important thing about this book: the knowledge comes from experience; the knowledge has been improvised by the playwrights; it has passed through their fingers, as it were.

To take one example: The formal scheme of a fugue, as it was taught in French organ lessons, always seemed somewhat one-sided to Gaël Liardon, because it had little in common even with the Bachian music it purported to follow. So the organist from Lausanne, a pupil of improvisation pioneer Rudolf Lutz, who died in 2018, examined a different model, that of Johann Pachelbel's light-footed, lucid, seemingly simple and yet highly original fugues. He analyzed them, tried to recreate them improvisationally, came up against his limits, discovered tricks and peculiarities in dealing with them and thus experimented with the analysis. Perhaps this is how Pachelbel himself once developed his method, who knows? This seems to me to be a wonderful basis for a procedure appropriate to the subject matter, a combination of pedagogy and virtuosity - and for improvisation itself finally taking its important place in musicology.

Compendium Improvisation. Fantasizing from historical sources of the 17th and 18th centuries, ed. by Markus Schwenkreis, Basel, 408 pp. Music examples, Fr. 74.00, Schwabe, Basel 2018; ISBN 978-3-7965-3709-7

This first of eight planned volumes of César Franck's collected organ and harmonium music presents four early works and two fragments. For many organ players, these are certainly new discoveries, as the works are not included in the canon of the composer's twelve "great" organ works.

The Fantaisie (Pièce) in A major was published in 1990 by Joël-Marie Fauquet (Editions musicales du Marais) and in 2008 in an edition corrected for certain printing errors by Bernhard Haas (Butz-Verlag). Fantaisie en ut majeur (early stages of the later C major Fantasie from the Six Pièces) and a Pièce en mi bémol majeur was published in 1973 by Schola Cantorum in an edition by Norbert Dufourcq. The charming Andantino in G minor was published in an anthology during Franck's lifetime, later also as a single edition, but was not given an opus number by him. In this respect, therefore, only the fragmentary works that have survived and are unfortunately not "complete" enough for a performance - a piece in E flat major, of which only the last five and a half pages have survived, and the beginning of a Prière (without conclusion) - are real new discoveries. Nevertheless, these are highly interesting testimonies to the composer, whose biographical background (for example, his "career start" as a piano-playing child prodigy until a fundamental rift with his father) and compositional development from sophisticated salon musician to mystic are still too little recognized. It is clearly recognizable that Franck conceived these works for early Romantic instruments (Saint-Roch 1842, Saint-Eustache 1853) and visibly struggled to formulate his tonal intentions because they did not yet correspond to Cavaillé-Coll's later standard and the more or less schematic "registration scenarios" possible with it. The composer's tonal language also occasionally still seems somewhat clumsy and (for example, in the accompanying figures) strongly inspired by the piano, but here and there certain "typical" Franck phrases already shine through.

The editor's excellent foreword now makes these connections accessible to a German and English-speaking audience, as Joël-Marie Fauquet's benchmark biography (Fayard 1999) is only available in French. The exemplary musical text and the detailed critical report provide a wealth of details on the works, their genesis and realization, and document editorial decisions in the light of already known editions. It will therefore be interesting to see whether new insights into Franck's "canonical" works already available in original editions (French publishers, reprinted by Butz) and new critical editions (Wiener Urtext, Henle) can be gained from the subsequent volumes.

César Franck: Complete Organ and Harmonium Works, Volume I: Early Organ Works / Fragments, edited by Christiane Strucken-Paland, BA 9291, € 29.95, Bärenreiter, Kassel

Short pieces are practical. Be it to supplement or structure a concert program, be it for instructive work in the university sector or be it to look over the shoulders of the composers a little more closely as they work. Two collections with numerous, predominantly short pieces by György Kurtág and Heinz Holliger, which were written over a fairly long period of time, should therefore attract a great deal of attention.

Under the title Signs, Games and Messages (Signs, Games and Messages), collections for violin, violoncello and clarinet, for example, have already been published. Now György Kurtág's solo and chamber music works for oboe and cor anglais are available, which deserve a closer look. His writing moves in an interesting field of tension between very precisely notated and very freely intended. Detailed articulation indications, such as various slurs (hierarchically or alternatively conceived), contrast with an extensive renunciation of bar lines or overly precise tempo or rhythm indications. Some ossia passages offer the performer options. In Kurtág's music, the most precise characterization possible is always central: here, a wide variety of verbal indications help, such as più sonore, raddolcendo, con slancio, disperato, pochiss. più intenso or again and again rubato and parlando.

The most extensive and best-known work in the collection is In Nomine - all'ongheresea magnificent monody that exists in a slightly different form for numerous instruments. But some shorter pieces also deserve in-depth study, such as the Sappho fragment or the two-part Hommage à Elliott Carter. In the chamber music works, a clarinet instrument is often added (in no less than three cases it is the contrabass clarinet). As a very short duo, the fierce Versetto for cor anglais and bass clarinet, but also the infinitely slow and (except for a brief outburst) infinitely quiet Rozsnyai Ilona in memoriam for cor anglais and contrabass clarinet. The two duos for soprano and oboe and cor anglais are also extremely poetic, Lorand Gaspar: Désert and Angelus Silesius: The Ros'. All the works in this extraordinary and magnificent collection are dedicated to Heinz Holliger, who penned the other edition, which is reported on here.

His collection consists of ten duos for oboe and harp, which were originally composed for his own use. They are playful, sometimes very short works, birthday presents for Robert Suter, Elliott Carter or Peter-Lukas Graf, for example, some of which have now also been arranged for other melody instruments (flute, carinette, saxophone). Two longer and very demanding pieces stand out at first glance from the "Albumblätter-Miniaturen": firstly, the work that gives the edition its title Un bouquet de penséesdedicated to his esteemed teacher Émile Castagnaud on his 90th birthday, an expansive dialogic song from 1999 for oboe d'amore and harp; on the other hand Surrogò, all'ongheresededicated to György Kurtág in 2006, a buzzing and shimmering composition (these expressions can be found in the subtitle!) of a highly energetic character for cor anglais and harp, which dissolves into a tonal nothingness at the end.

In addition to this extremely worthwhile compilation, the previously published Mobile for oboe and harp. On the one hand, the new edition is indispensable, as significant changes have been made to both the harp and oboe parts. On the other hand, the work now loses a decisive characteristic feature: the twelve short parts were printed on one large page in the first edition and could be played in three different sequences. If now, with the new edition, an entire booklet (in which the three versions are printed one after the other) is played through and, in addition, the transitional fermatas have to be constantly leafed through, the quasi-improvisatory character of the performance, for which the title Mobile stands. The reviewer takes the liberty of recommending that the individual parts be slightly reduced in size and glued onto a large cardboard as in the first edition. With good placement, the two musicians could even play from a music box, which would allow for even more lively and spontaneous interactions.

György Kurtàg: Signs, Games and Messages, solos and chamber music works for oboe and cor anglais, Z. 15 074, ca. Fr. 52.00, Editio Musica Budapest 2018

Heinz Holliger: Un bouquet de pensées, 10 pieces for oboe (oboe d'amore, cor anglais) and harp (individual pieces also for flute/alto flute, clarinet, soprano/alto/tenor saxophone and harp), score and parts ED 9467, € 55.00, Schott, Mainz

id., Mobile, for oboe and harp, playing score ED 5384, € 28.00, Schott, Mainz

Brigitte Bachmann-Geiser's book is not a history of folk music, as the author herself states in the foreword, but a four-hundred-page collection of material. Why it still bears this title, however, remains a mystery.

The publication summarizes the life's work of Brigitte Bachmann-Geiser; this is both the strength and the weakness of the book. The variety of topics and the breadth of the collected material is impressive. Hardly anyone has spent so long and so intensively studying the various facets of Swiss folk music, resulting in a unique collection of material that makes this book a must-read for all specialists. From historical evidence to Alpine blessings, types of yodeling, folk songs, the alphorn, brass band music to children's instruments and calendar customs, a wide range of topics are covered. All chapters are accompanied by a wealth of illustrations. The collection is completed acoustically by two CDs with examples of the individual chapters and with melodies, rhythms and noise in calendar customs, making it a remarkable concept that is not only impressive in terms of text, but also visually and sonically.

However, the book has some weaknesses that cloud the positive overall impression. The selection and weighting of the material seems very random. For example, thirteen pages are devoted to cattle bells and cowbells, while the Swiss Yodelling Association is given just one page. Ländler music - after all, one of the central genres of Swiss folk music - is also dealt with on five and a half pages. This weighting would be tolerable if it were somehow justified. However, there is no indication as to why it has been chosen or what is meant by folk music here. The handling of the collected source material is also unsatisfactory. For example, it is claimed that the cow rows in the 18th and 19th centuries were written down without lyrics because the foreign researchers could not do anything with the Swiss dialect, but the fact that Jean-Jacques Rousseau explicitly attributed his example to the bagpipe is omitted. It is also a pity that there are numerous errors of detail. For example, a photo of Stocker Sepp in front of a Swissair plane is dated "around 1925", although Swissair was only founded in 1931, or it is claimed that Bligg's title Folk music had been in the hit parade for weeks, which cannot be confirmed on the basis of the Swiss hit parade lists.

What is most disappointing, however, is that most of the chapters are stuck in the 1970s and 1980s and have hardly been updated - and if they have, then with a few, carelessly researched sentences. This is particularly noticeable in the chapter on the "Renewal of folk music", which is limited to the 1960s to 1980s and barely mentions the last 25 years, during which Swiss folk music was extremely lively and changed considerably.

The book is therefore highly recommended as a collection of sources for critical specialists, but is less suitable as an overview for beginners.

Brigitte Bachmann-Geiser: History of Swiss folk music, 399 pp., 187 illustrations, 2 CDs, Fr. 64.00, Schwabe, Basel 2019, ISBN 978-3-7965-3853-7