At the end of the 1970s, Leggewie lived in Algeria, where he witnessed how raï, the folk and popular music of the Maghreb state, was increasingly flourishing. Both Raï and genres as diverse as Afro-beat and Balkan pop have been subsumed under the term "world music" for decades. In the view of the two editors, this is an outdated term, "a colonial relic". They prefer the term global pop. According to Leggewie and Meyer, it stands for "a collective category of all conceivable styles and regional origins of non-Western, especially non-Western music".

In an interview with WDR, Leggewie said that the book demonstrates "the courage to leave gaps". Indeed, the almost 400-page work is not an encyclopaedia, but a source of reading with over forty contributions from various authors - including Johannes Rühl, artistic director of the international music festival Alpentöne in Altdorf. While the first part of the volume endeavors to explain terms such as folklore, transculturality and world music, the following section offers well-researched but not exhaustive portraits of influential figures such as the ethnomusicologist Brian Shimkovitz, who makes hundreds of African music tapes accessible on his blog, or the US guitarist Ry Cooder. Over the past decades, Cooder has curiously explored different styles such as Tex-Mex, Mali blues and Cuban son, and in 1996, with the album Buena Vista Social Club the rediscovery of forgotten Cuban musicians such as Ibrahim Ferrer.

Chapter three then looks at the market conditions behind the music. In his text "World Music Festivals and the Festivalization of World Music", Klaus Näumann, professor at the Institute for European Ethnomusicology at the University of Cologne, describes how world music events suggest the illusion of global harmony and mutual acceptance. In reality, however, a white, left-leaning middle class celebrates only those things (music, clothing, etc.) that do not run counter to the ideal. In the largest and concluding part Global Pop brief outlines of numerous genres such as Rembetiko, Highlife or J-Pop. These are not intended for specialists in the respective styles, but for the uninitiated and the interested. The book is exemplary, i.e. the focus is entirely at the discretion of the two editors. Accordingly, it would be all too easy to criticize the fact that neither tango nor gamelan - the music ensembles of Indonesia - have found their way into the book. But that is ultimately a minor matter, because: With Global Pop Leggewie and Meyer may not have succeeded in writing the definitive book on the subject, but it is one that arouses curiosity and encourages not only further reading, but also listening to the artists mentioned.

Global Pop - Das Buch zur Weltmusik, edited by Claus Leggewie and Erik Meyer, 392 p., Fr. 31.00, J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-476-02636-1

The first prize of CHF 16,000 went to clarinettist Shuyue Zhao and the second prize of CHF 14,000 to violinist HannaH Walter. The clarinettist Azra Ramic received 10,000 francs for third prize. Shuyue Zhao, born in China in 1990, studied at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) with Ernesto Molinari. In June of this year, she was awarded the Eduard Tschumi Prize for the best soloist examination at the HKB.

Born in 1989, HannaH Walter completed a master's degree in contemporary music at the Basel University of Music with distinction in 2016. She is currently completing a Master's in Transdisciplinarity at the Zurich University of the Arts. Azra Ramić, born in 1989, completed a Master's in Music Performance for clarinet at Bern University of the Arts in 2013. This was followed by a Master's degree with distinction in bass clarinet at the same university in 2015.

The Concours Nicati, an interpretation competition for contemporary music in Switzerland for professional musicians, is held every two years at the Bern University of the Arts.
 

Culinary delights play an important role in many great and famous operas. In Gioacchino Rossini's Cinderella opera "La Cenerentola", for example, sumptuous feasts are celebrated, while in Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Falstaff", people meet in the famous final scene Andiamo a cena to the great banquet and in Umberto Giordano's "La Cena delle Beffe" the Cenathe big dinner, even appears in the title of his famous opera.

Also in the Restaurant Opera the name says it all. Here, opera guests can enjoy a relaxed dinner just a few steps away from Zurich Opera House. David Krüger, Head Ambassador Kitchen, and Pascal Gloser, Head Ambassador Restaurant, take care of the guests' well-being as hosts and conjure up creative dishes using regional products. The 3-course menu is served punctually and guaranteed within 60 minutes if booked up to 90 minutes before the performance. Otherwise the restaurant will take care of the bill.

In addition to the "Opera Guarantee", hotel guests can now purchase their opera tickets directly at the hotel. For selected performances, the Hotel Ambassador à l'Opera offers two premium tickets - seats in the middle of the second front row.

Have you ever heard folk music from the Belgian provinces? When I tried out the pieces in this new booklet, it really "took my sleeve in"!

Marinette Bonnert and Tommaso Huber have published a booklet for accordion solo M2 (standard bass) with easy to moderately difficult dances from Flanders and Wallonia. They present a colorful cross-section of the repertoire of very elegant, airy and filigree folk and dance music, especially from the 18th century. This music has been handed down in manuscript, printed or oral form in various sources. Marinette Bonnert herself comes from Belgium, describes herself as an ambassador of Walloon music and has carefully selected the pieces for this publication. Suites consisting of contra dances alternate with individual dance movements such as minuets, polkas, waltzes and schottisches. Tommaso Huber comes from Austria, has played the accordion since childhood and studied double bass. In the foreword, the two go into more detail about the origins of the music and in a separate, introductory section they explain and illustrate the type of bass notation in minute detail. The melody parts of the individual pieces are often monophonic, but are carried by a harmonically interesting bass. The arrangements are extremely appealing and can also tempt you to add your own embellishments or inspire interpretations with the single-tone accordion - a truly great and valuable enrichment for all those who feel drawn to the folk music of other countries!

Marinette Bonnert and Tommaso Huber: Dances from Flanders & Wallonia, 23 easy to moderately difficult characteristic dances for accordion M2, UE 36123, € 14.95, Universal Edition, Vienna 2016

Telemann's chamber music double concerto for two violas accompanied by a third viola is a good opportunity for group lessons. As the composer was a friend of Bach, who was working in Weimar at the time, when he wrote this concerto in Eisenach, he placed four chorale-like columns with B-A-C-B in the upper voice at the beginning of the G minor middle movement and was inspired by Vivaldi's chromatic expressiveness in the subsequent Adagio. The two outer movements in B flat major are easy to play - only up to the 3rd position - and are well placed. Continuo score and bass part complete the edition.

With this realization of a cello concerto, Johann Baptist Vaňhal (1739-1813, Czech: Jan Křtitel Vaňhal) took a stand against the stepmotherly treatment of the viola at the time. The cheerfully animated concerto is of medium difficulty and only requires 1st to 3rd position for the solo part. The fingerings are good, but unnecessarily copious. The cadenzas created by the editor are considerably more difficult than the solo part. They extend into the 6th position and use numerous double stops; they could be simplified. Overall, however, the new edition is a stroke of luck for viola players.

Georg Philipp Telemann: Concerto B-A-C-H for 2 solo violas, viola III (da braccio/da gamba) and b. c., reconstruction by Klaus Hofmann, EW 1013, € 17.50, Edition Walhall, Magdeburg 2016

Jan Křtitel Vaňhal: Concerto in C major for viola and orchestra, edited by Vilém Blažek, piano reduction and solo part, BA 11531-90, € 14.95, Bärenreiter, Prague 2016

The Hungarian composer Kamillo Lendvay, born in 1928, honored the 50th anniversary of Béla Bartók's death in 1995 with the composition of a Study for solo viola, which was finally published in 2015. It makes expressive use of the entire range of the viola up to the middle of the A-string; beginning thoughtfully, moving forward in various tempi and exciting rhythmic combinations, sometimes asymmetrically moving, sometimes metrically pounding and ending calmly - an exciting solo lasting around 7 minutes!

The violin school initiated by Erich and Elma Doflein for their violin school 44 Duets for two violins in ascending difficulty were composed by Béla Bartók in 1931. Universal published 36 of them in 1994, Atelier-Editions Röhm recently published them all in two volumes and Editio Musica Budapest (EMB) last year in one volume for viola. Everything is a fifth lower and otherwise identical to the violin version. The special thing about EMB is that the publishers have made a CD of the duets in the viola version: Voices from the Past: Béla Bartók's Duos & Original Field Recordings, Tantara Records, 2013, because Bartók placed great importance on these duets - as well as his Microcosm for piano - folk melodies that he recorded in Algeria, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Slovakia and the Ukraine, some of them with an Edison phonograph on wax cylinders. These recordings can be listened to on the CD for a deeper understanding and the lyrics of the songs can be read in the booklet in the original languages and in English.

Kamillo Lendvay, Study for viola, Z. 14953, Fr. 18.80, Editio Musica Budapest 2015

Béla Bartók: 44 Duos for 2 Violas, transcribed by Donald Maurice and Claudine Bigelow, Z. 14970, Fr. 22.70, Editio Musica Budapest 2016

There must have been hundreds and hundreds of concepts that the Ensemble Neue Horizonte Bern has performed and tested over the decades, scores that often only consist of verbal playing instructions that leave great scope for the imagination, but which nevertheless need to be interpreted precisely. This is how experience is formed, and everyone has to (re)gain it for themselves from the pieces. As interest in conceptual music has risen sharply in recent years, it is only fitting that Urs Peter Schneider, one of the musicians of Horizons, has now compiled a compendium from his wealth of experience: The volume published by Aart-Verlag Conceptual music iis on the one hand an anthology, by no means complete, as a list of further conceptual pieces points out, and on the other an incredibly rich reader. The big names are there, Fluxus, Cage, Wolff, but also a lot of Helvetic and some things that have already been forgotten.

The book, which was created as a research project at the Bern University of the Arts, admittedly offers no history of conceptual music, no definitions and delimitations (not even of current trends) and therefore no theory, but nevertheless classifies the printed concepts according to a simple letter system. On LaMonte Young's famous piece Draw a straight line and follow it about: A2 (everyday actions), H1 (postures), K6 (continuity), M5 (minimalism), N2 (nuances), N3 (sobriety), R2 (space), R5 (recipe), S2 (writing), S9 (stillness), T1 (dance), U3 (unicum) - and this gives us an idea of a typical Schneiderian order, a kind of theory, or at least of what is important and characteristic of concepts. Thirdly, a commentary section classifies at least some of the concept pieces, explains, considers, reports on performances and makes it clear that this is a very practice-oriented selection. From then on, this anthology is an absolute must for performance teaching.

Urs Peter Schneider: Conceptual Music. An annotated anthology, ed. by Thomas Gartmann and Marc Kilchenmann, 370 p., Fr. 35.00, Aart-Verlag, Bern 2016, ISBN 978-3-9524749-0-7

Book launch and concert
Sat. October 21, 2017, 7 p.m.
Bern University of the Arts, Great Concert Hall,
Papiermühlestrasse 13d, 3014 Berne
Students of the HKB, Ensemble Neue Horizonte Bern
Management Urs Peter Schneider

It's hard to imagine a more sympathetic greeting for a 100th birthday. Not an ephemeral bouquet of flowers, not an embarrassing gift, not an interchangeable word - no, a whole hour of lovingly selected music. The Kaléidoscope The CD with works and recordings by Julien-François Zbinden is much more than a sonorous declaration of love from the archives of Radio Télévision Suisse and the Studio de Lausanne. It documents a rich and playful life as a pianist and composer and in this case is dedicated neither to the symphony nor the string quartet, but to all those often marginalized genres that are not at home in the concert hall or have lost their traditional place in today's media business: Music for wind orchestra, the so-called "light muse" and the French chanson.

The result is a wonderful bouquet full of rarities, produced mainly in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which Julien-François Zbinden can be heard either as a soloist playing one of the great jazz standards, as an accompanist on the piano or as the creator of new scores. The fact that Zbinden himself still actively worked on the booklet testifies to his unbroken physical and mental vitality. May she remain with us for a while yet!

Why is the piano literature for the left hand alone so much more extensive than that for the right hand?

There are anatomical reasons for this: with the thumb as a melody guide, the left hand is far better able to operate the entire width of the keyboard. In addition, pianists are obviously more likely to injure their right hand when practicing improperly and are then forced to restrict themselves to the left for a while. Alexander Scriabin, for example, practiced his Prélude et Nocturne composed for the left hand.

Above all, however, we have Paul Wittgenstein to thank for the majority of these works. The Viennese pianist lost his right arm in the First World War and yet was determined to continue his career against all odds (including from his family). Wealthy from home, he was able to commission works from the most famous composers of the time. Prokofiev, Hindemith, Britten, Richard Strauss, Franz Schmidt and many others wrote piano concertos for his needs, the latter even wrote chamber music. However, none became as famous and is played as often as Ravel's.

This was not initially foreseeable: Wittgenstein apparently only realized over time what a masterpiece he had received. And as the commissioner, he felt entitled to alter entire passages to his liking, which naturally infuriated Ravel. In her introduction to the new Bärenreiter edition, Christine Baur is able to convey this dispute and much more about the creation and reception of this extraordinary work in an exciting way. The excellent edition not only corrects some long-standing errors in the Durand edition, but also provides a wealth of additional information worth knowing based on sources from Wittgenstein's private collection, which editor Douglas Woodfull-Harris was able to consult. In particular, the insight into Wittgenstein's requests for alterations confirms that he could not really comprehend Ravel's ingenious way of writing for the left hand.

If you would like to find out more about Wittgenstein's fate, we recommend the volume Empty Sleeve. The musician and patron Paul Wittgenstein (Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck et al. 2006), but above all Concerto for the left hand by Lea Singer (Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 2008): an exciting and well-written artist's novel!

Maurice Ravel, Concerto for the left hand for piano and orchestra, edited by Douglas Woodfull-Harris; score, BA 7881, €, 48.95; piano reduction, part(s), BA 7881-90, € 36.95; Bärenreiter, Kassel 2016

The traces of Ernest Chausson's Piano Trio (1881) lead to Switzerland: the 26-year-old composer, who had bitterly turned his back on all academic institutions in Paris after his unsuccessful application for the Prix de Rome, spent the summer at the country estate of his mentor Berthe de Rayssac in Montbovon, Canton Fribourg. There, in the picturesque Pays d'Enhaut, he began sketching and working on his most extensive and ambitious composition to date as soon as he arrived. It may also have been a defiant reaction to the defeat he had previously suffered. In this Opus 3, Chausson found himself as a composer, and it is fortunate that he no longer submitted to academic rules and was not discouraged by the initial lack of recognition. However, he subsequently showed his trio to César Franck and Emanuel Chabrier, played it to the painter Odilon Redon and took their advice to heart. The work was premiered in April 1882 at a concert of the Société nationale de musique, but was not published for the first time until 1919, twenty years after the composer's early and tragic death, by the Parisian publisher Rouart-Lerolle.

The 30-minute work with its four movements is surprisingly entertaining, in contrast to Chausson's more famous "Concerto" for piano, violin and string quartet op. 21, which is 45 minutes long. The cross-movement quoting of themes in the manner of leitmotifs in the Piano Trio op. 3, as well as the harmony, are reminiscent of Chausson's role models César Franck and Richard Wagner. However, his musical language also points to the following generation of composers, above all Claude Debussy. Ernest Chausson occupies an important place in French music!

The new Henle edition of this piano trio is mainly based on the first edition of 1919, as there are no further sources. There is no longer an autograph, only a few sketches of themes and structural models. As always, Henle's music is easy to read, practical at the turning points and even contains a dictionnaire (French/German and French/English) of the original French performance and tempo markings in each part. The indication of the time signature in the second movement in fast 3/8 time, entitled "Vite", is also extremely useful: the first bar of a counting unit is always indicated with a one. This makes rehearsing much easier! The piano part was provided with fingerings by Klaus Schilde, the string parts contain no technical indications. However, the printed phrasing sheets can largely be used as a technical realization.

Ernest Chausson: Piano trio in G minor op. 3 for violin, violoncello and piano, edited by Peter Jost, score and parts, HN 1277, € 29.00, G. Henle Verlag, Munich 2016

The fact that the rediscovery of early music and the turn to historical performance practice was neither the result of a revolution nor without influential personalities is made clear by the book The harpsichordist Isolde Ahlgrimm (1914-1995) clearly. A generation younger than Wanda Landowska (1879-1959), Isolde Ahlgrimm relied more uncompromisingly than Landowska on teaching works and musical sources from the past; half a generation older than Gustav Leonhardt (born 1928) and Nikolaus Harnoncourt (born 1929), she was a source of inspiration for these pioneers and - despite all differences of opinion - a supporter, at times even a musical partner. She trained as a pianist at the Vienna Academy of Music and, at the age of twenty, met the controversial collector and charismatic advocate of unconditional fidelity to the original, Erich Fiala, whom she married in 1938. While performances of Mozart's keyboard works on the fortepiano were initially the focus of her own "Concerts for Connoisseurs and Lovers", from 1943 she turned to the (pedal) harpsichord and thus to the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach, which she recorded (almost) in their entirety between 1951 and 1956. After her divorce from Fiala, this finally opened the door to an international career and a teaching position at the Vienna University of Music. Until 1983, she gave concerts at home and abroad, as far afield as the USA and Japan, and was a particularly frequent and popular performer in Switzerland. Isolde Ahlgrimm died in Vienna on October 11, 1995.

In many ways, Ahlgrimm was far ahead of her time. First of all, this concerned her meticulous work with sources, thanks to which she compiled a compendium (posthumously edited in 2004) of the Ornamentation of music for keyboard instruments could compose. On the other hand, she decided (all too) late, in 1972, to play on real copies of historical instruments and remained faithful to her Ammer harpsichords with their long (piano) keys. She rejected certain mannerisms of her younger (especially Dutch) colleagues and relied on a multitude of historical statements and examples. Even in her insistence on professionalism and technical perfection, she always remained a supporter of good taste or, as she herself said, "bonne grace".

The expanded and enriched translation of an English biography of her last student Peter Watchorn from 2007 by another former student, the Swiss Regula Winkelman, rightly draws attention to the work of the important Viennese harpsichordist as a preliminary collection of material. The reprinting of Ahlgrimm's own accompanying texts to the complete Bach recording is particularly commendable; in their complexity and wealth of ideas, they are indispensable documents of Bach's reception in the 20th century.

Regula Winkelman, Peter Watchorn: The harpsichordist Isolde Ahlgrimm (1914-1995). A pioneer of historical performance practice, 288 p., hardcover, € 29.99, Böhlau, Vienna and others 2016, ISBN 978-3-205-79679-4

The 1964 national exhibition in Lausanne presented modern Switzerland in terms of technology and architecture, forgetting the culture and needs of the mountain dwellers. To fill the gap, so to speak, the Forum alpinum study group published a four-language illustrated book in 1965 and the Anthology of authentic folk music from the Swiss mountains before. However, this record edition was hardly noticed, was withdrawn from the market as early as 1966 and was only recognized as an important document in a CD recording in 2008.

The lack of understanding of traditional Swiss music also meant that the 435 handwritten music books containing 11,874 folk dances, which Hanny Christen had collected from all over Switzerland between 1940 and 1960 and donated to the Basel University Library in 1963, were forgotten. It was not until 1992 that the Zurich musician and publisher Fabian Müller recognized the value of this collection. A team of 17 volunteers initially created a database and inventoried 10,000 dances by canton and contributor. With financial support from the Society for Folk Music in Switzerland (GVS/SMPS), ten large-format volumes were published in 2002 under the title Swiss folk music collection. The dance music of Switzerland in the 19th and first half of the 20th century collected by Hanny Christen be presented. The dances from all over Switzerland (with the exception of the canton of Thurgau), written down in unison, were copied by the collector mainly from handwritten dance books and supplemented with aurally notated recordings of instrumental pieces by older musicians. The Christen collection contains dance genres that extend today's repertoire of ländler, waltz, polka and schottisch with mazurka, galopp, cross polka, polonaise, varsovienne, tyrolienne, allewander and montferrine.

After the publication of the Christen collection, professional folk musicians led by cellist Fabian Müller founded the Hanneli-Musig, set about realizing the sheet music and in 2004 were able to release the first of seven recordings, the album Blümchen Wunderhold (ZYT 4895, out of print). This was followed in 2005 under the title Nightmares Tänze aus der Innerschweiz (ZYT 4897, out of print). A year later, the six musicians, all of whom also collaborated on the selection and arrangement of the monophonic melodies, published the CD Tänzix (ZYT 4900). Abbreviations and numbers indicating the canton of origin and the collection location of each piece make it possible to refer to the original notation. Those who prefer the printed polyphonic arrangements of the first three recordings will find them in specialist shops.

With the album Zealand from 2008, the Hanneli-Musig revives the harmonious repertoire of the Biberemusig from the 1850s (Murten region, ZYT 4919) and with the title Basel area (ZYT 4930) will pay tribute to Hanny Christen in 2010 with folk music from her homeland.

In the recently released album About Stock & Stei the skilled Ländler clarinettist Dani Häusler, the minstrel Johannes Schmid-Kunz on the violin, the editor of the Christen dances and cellist Fabian Müller, the thoroughbred musician Ueli Mooser on double bass and saxophone, the brass player Christoph Mächler and Fränggi Gehrig with the accordion offer "lüpfige" dances from the Alpine regions of the cantons of St. Gallen, Glarus and Graubünden, some of them performed at virtuoso speed.

It is certainly a pleasure to listen to all these recordings - and one hopes for more - as testimonies to Swiss musical landscapes, but one misses the efforts of historical performance practice in the interpretations of the Hanneli-Musig.