The production was awarded first prize in the International Rhythmic Workshop competition at the Festspielhaus Hellerau. The complexity of the choreography, the level of dance and the contrapuntal approach convinced the international jury, writes the HKB. They also praised the virtuoso live violin playing by Malwina Sosnowski and the lighting design by Patrick Hunka.

For the three Master's students Naja Parejas, Jessica Raas and Stefanie Scheuner, as well as Bachelor's graduate Dorian Kaufeisen, it was a great opportunity to be able to present themselves at "this historically significant festival venue, the birthplace of rhythm", the HKB continued.

According to the DOV, over 40,000 listeners attended the Staatsoper für alle concert with the Berlin Staatskapelle and Daniel Barenboim in Berlin on July 9. More than 30,000 listeners attended the Kassel State Orchestra's Summer Night Open Air on July 16. On August 17, 20,000 people listened to the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra in Frankfurt, and 37,000 music lovers gathered for the NDR Classic Open Air on July 23 in Hanover. Many concerts are broadcast on screens or via livestream, on radio and television.

Symphony orchestras in Switzerland are also getting a breath of fresh air. For example, the St. Gallen Symphony Orchestra will be performing at its 16th Classic Openair concert in front of the Tonhalle St. Gallen on August 27. On July 8 to 10, the Musikkollegium Winterthur performed at its Classic Openair in Winterthur's Rychenbergpark.

After Bach's death, the original part material of the cantata passed into the possession of the Thomasschule, according to the Bach Archive in Leipzig. It is now kept in the Bach Archive in Leipzig. The score, on the other hand, turned up in Berlin in the early 19th century and was acquired by Henri Hinrichsen for the Peters Music Library in 1917.

After Hinrichsen was murdered in Auschwitz, his son Walter took the score in 1945 and brought it to New York. In 1982, Paul Sacher acquired it at a Sotheby's auction for his collection in Basel. The unusually large score of twelve leaves documents Bach's creative process in a particularly instructive and detailed manner. It is therefore extremely valuable for the study of his creative style and revision activities, write the Leipzig-based company.

With the help of public funding bodies and private supporters, the Bach Archive Foundation has already been able to raise around 1.5 million euros for the acquisition of the "many times more valuable manuscript". The archive is asking for donations to finance the remaining 500,000 euros.

After his death, Karl Burri, the well-known Swiss instrument dealer, promoter of wind music and collector of historical instruments, left behind an important collection of well over 1000 wind instruments and drums spanning 300 years. Although there was great public interest and the museum in Zimmerwald was well attended by amateurs and experts alike, there were fears for the survival of the collection. A good ten years later, this has finally come to an end: the "Burri Instrument Collection Foundation", which was set up specifically for this purpose, has taken over the collection in its entirety and will make it accessible in the heart of Bern's old town.

In future, Burri's legacy will be exhibited as the "Sounding Collection" at Kramgasse 66 (between Zytglogge and Konsi). Scenographer Martin Birrer has been engaged for the concept; private sponsors will ensure its operation.

The Klingende Sammlung will be more than just a museum. In addition to the permanent exhibition and guided tours on various topics (brass band, instrument making), workshops are also offered. Music enthusiasts can try out and play some of the instruments themselves. The Klingende Sammlung also researches the historically significant instruments and lends them out to specialists.

The Klingende Sammlung will celebrate its opening on January 21, 2017.

Further information is available at: www.klingende-sammlung.ch

In the RISM contract concluded between the Internationales Quellenlexikon der Musik e.V. association, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin undertakes to host the new RISM indexing system Muscat. Muscat will replace the previous Kallisto system, which is already hosted in Berlin, at the end of 2016.

The Bavarian State Library has committed itself to continuing to host and further develop the presentation system for RISM data (RISM-OPAC). The RISM-OPAC (opac.rism.info) was conceived in 2008 in a joint project between RISM, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

The RIdIM contract concluded between the RIdIM Association, the RISM Working Group Germany and the Bavarian State Library regulates the regular transfer of German RIdIM data to the international RIdIM database (db.ridim.org). The German RIdIM research center, which is based at the Bavarian State Library and funded by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities in Mainz, has been cataloguing music iconographic sources since 1979, which have been searchable in an online database since 2007: www.ridim-deutschland.de.

According to the official press release from the Tonhalle-Gesellschaft Zürich, "the Board of Directors and the management are looking forward to continuing their collaboration with Lionel Bringuier over the next two years and to the joint challenges and opportunities at the new venue in Zurich West from 2017/18".

Lionel Bringuier took over the position in Zurich from David Zinman in 2014. Previous highlights together include the world premiere of the orchestral work "Caravan" by Esa-Pekka Salonen at the start of the 2014/15 season, the recording of all of Maurice Ravel's orchestral works for Deutsche Grammphon and the two successful European tours with re-invitations, writes the Tonhalle Society.

This Sunday, the Jardins Musicaux festival orchestra, conducted by Valentin Reymond, will perform two outstanding works of Russian modernism in Biel's Pasquart Church. It will begin with Stravinsky's four-movement suite (Divertimento) from the ballet Le baiser de la féeto which he was inspired by Andersen's fairy tale The Snow Queen was inspired. In this work, the Russian revolutionary pays homage to Tchaikovsky, the master of classical ballet par excellence. Shostakovich's 1st Violin Concerto is also on the matinee program. Since the scandal surrounding his sarcastic 9th Symphony in 1945, Shostakovich had been blacklisted by the party and his music was on the index. He completed his monumental 1st Violin Concerto in 1948, but the score remained on his desk until Stalin's death. It was not until 1955 that the work could be performed by David Oistrakh, to whom it was dedicated, and the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Mravinsky. Two months later, Oistrakh led it to triumph with the New York Philharmonic. With its symphonic dimensions, the concerto draws on the entire imaginable technical, physical and emotional register. It is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful concertos of the 20th century.

Raffle of tickets
The Schweizer Musikzeitung is giving away some free tickets for this matinee. Please send an e-mail with the keyword "Russian music" and your name by Saturday, August 20, 12 noon at the latest to: contact@musikzeitung.ch. Please let us know if you need one or two tickets if you are one of the lucky winners. You will be notified by e-mail on Saturday afternoon.

According to Olaf Zimmermann, Managing Director of the German Cultural Council, the levy will fall from 5.2 percent to 4.8 percent next year. This will make it clear that better monitoring of companies will lead to significant relief.

A law introduced last year to stabilize the artists' social security contribution rate appears to be working. It aims to ensure that all those who award freelance contracts to artists and publicists comply with the obligation to pay the levy. They are therefore also audited with regard to the artists' social security contribution during the usual social security audits.

The levy is payable in Germany when companies, associations or the public sector pay fees for freelance artistic work. This covers 30 percent of the social security contributions for health, pension and long-term care insurance for freelance artists. The federal government pays 20 percent of the contributions. Artists insured under the artists' social insurance scheme pay 50 percent of the contribution, similar to salaried employees.
 

The sheet music is fastened with clothespins. Bircher muesli, croissants and Swiss cheese variations await concertgoers on the buffet table. "Landpartie - the family brunch by the lake" is the name of the second Davos Festival concert. The event at Schwarzsee is a premiere. Once again, artistic director Reto Bieri has discovered a new concert venue that sets familiar music in an unfamiliar setting. A Sunday outing in casual clothes with music, good company and delicious food - a combination that works perfectly on this morning in bright sunshine. The open-air concert is no mere attempt to make classical music more palatable for today's concertgoers, as the wind serenades were actually composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for outdoor performance. When the eight young wind players and a double bass player play the Serenade in E flat major KV 375 and you listen to it sitting on beer benches, then music enters everyday life in a natural way. The Davos Festival Chamber Choir under the direction of Andreas Felber not only enchants with perfectly intoned Schubert movements, but also sings the folk songs together with the audience Girls, if you want to go dancing and Il Cucu. The alpine sounds of the Viennese band Alma are also a perfect match for this secluded spot by the lake. Here, kitsch-free yodeling meets crisp, strongly rhythmic violin playing. Accordion and double bass provide color and grounding.

"Family zone" is the name of this year's motto. Bieri discovered it in the SBB train carriages. The creative festival organizer is not interested in theoretical dramaturgical concepts. His ideas come from everyday life and lead back to it. "I'm like a spider and try to develop a web of relationships. Here in Davos, 80 young artists from all over the world come together. They are embarking on this musical adventure. I want something to stick with them and the visitors," says Bieri. That's why he has once again composed 25 concert programs for his third festival edition, with catchy titles such as "Habemus Papam", "Stammbäumchen" or "Muttersprache". Free concerts in the coffee house and train station, an open stage, a listening tour in nature for children and the Young Reporters workshop complete the program. The family zone deals with family relationships between composers and keys. It is about childhood and home. At the beginning of the concert "Nussdorferstrasse 54", the artistic director himself paints Franz Schubert's birthplace on an overhead projector. With the excavation of Joseph Weigl's The Swiss family (1809), which Schubert loved, can even be experienced as a chamber opera in Davos.

The opening concert in the sober hall of the Hotel Schweizerhof takes us into the family zone of Clara and Robert Schumann. The excerpts from the marriage diary, sensitively performed by Julian Lehr, in which Clara wishes Robert would allow her to compose, correspond with the inner movements of the Piano Quintet in E flat major op. 44, composed at the same time. Together with pianist Benedek Horváth, the Quatuor Ardeo places it somewhere between happiness and despair. The evening opened with a virtuoso performance by Thierry de Mey's Table Musicwhich Eléna Beder, Carlota Cáceres and Frank Dupree drum and stroke on the table with their bare hands. The 24-year-old German is actually invited to the festival as a pianist, but for this demanding work he was also asked by the artistic director to play his second instrument, percussion. "Everything is completely different here in Davos. You perform with completely different line-ups. There is a lot of rehearsing. Experimental pieces also find their place here. In addition to percussion, I've also played the grand piano, the piano, an electric piano and a toy piano," says Dupree and presents himself as an uncomplicated, versatile musician who is familiar with Franz Liszt's Weeping, lamenting, worrying, fretting as much as with John Cage's Suite for Toy Piano (1948), which he plays while sitting on a yoga stool. He is one of the many highly talented musicians who can be heard in Davos. Mi-sa Yang from the French Quatuor Ardeo touches the Davos Laret church with a mature interpretation of Bach's second partita for solo violin in D minor. The Cologne-based Asasello Quartet, which, like the other string quartets, also rehearses smaller works with the festival orchestra and conducts from the podium, presents a tonally balanced interpretation of Mozart's D minor Quartet K. 421 in the "Kinderzimmer" concert.  

The festival budget was increased again, to 750,000 francs, because a singing week was added for the first time in February. Half of the budget is provided by companies or sponsoring foundations. Only just under 15 percent are subsidies. Not everything is equally successful at the start of the festival. In their nostalgia and unbroken tonality, the pieces by Valentin Silvestrov, this year's composer in residence, seem like a delicate stylistic copy of Franz Schubert or Frédéric Chopin. The small-scale programs, interspersed with breaks, sometimes only whet the appetite, which is then not fully satisfied. But Reto Bieri has planned for this desire for more. The audience should be stimulated, but not satiated. There should be room for reflection - and also for re-singing. The latter is possible free of charge every morning in the hotel's Living Room together with the Davos Festival Chamber Choir. Deep River sounds ready for performance after half an hour of loosening up, singing and rehearsing with Andreas Felber in five-part harmony. However, a concert is not planned. The joy of singing together is enough for the participants.

www.davosfestival.ch
 

With the help of several case studies, the researchers from five countries also want to analyze the ways in which musical traditions were deliberately used for certain political and religious purposes. The project "Sound Memories: The Musical Past in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Europe" (SoundMe) is being supported by the European HERA funding initiative with a total of around 1.2 million euros.

A working group led by Inga Mai Groote from the Department of Musicology at the University of Heidelberg will be looking in particular at examples from Protestant Germany. There, despite the innovations in liturgy and musical practice, older repertoires such as the Latin chorale remained in deliberate use.

In addition to Groote, the international research team includes scientists from the Universities of Cambridge (UK) and Prague (Czech Republic) as well as the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. The overall project is being coordinated by Karl Kügle from Utrecht University (Netherlands).
 

In June 2016, the cantonal government of Uri approved the continuation of the foundation (2016 to 2019) and the amendment of the foundation agreement and guidelines. From 2016, the foundation's board of trustees will be able to award CHF 30,000 for work and funding contributions, CHF 6,000 more than before.

This year, the Board of Trustees is once again offering a four-month Berlin studio scholarship. In addition to the use of living space, the stay abroad also includes a travel and living allowance. A nine-member board of trustees is responsible for the jury. It is made up of representatives from the various cultural sectors and is elected by the Uri Art Association and the cantonal government. Composer and musician Fabian Müller and theater and musicologist Franz-Xaver Nager sit on the board as music experts.

Since 1982, the Uri Art and Culture Foundation (until 2015 the Heinrich Danioth Foundation) has pledged around 169 contributions amounting to CHF 933,000. This includes six New York and eight Berlin studios, 17 years of work and around 134 grants and project contributions.

This find, which is significant in terms of music history, is a recording of the Afghan singer Abdul Kadir Khan, which was made in the so-called "Half Moon Camp" and recorded by German researchers for ethnological and linguistic research purposes using the then new gramophone technology. The Half Moon Camp was a prisoner-of-war camp in Wünsdorf near Berlin, where mainly Muslim prisoners of war were held.

The recordings, produced in 1916, were discovered by researchers from the Afghanistan Music Research Center (AMRC) of the Franz Liszt University of Music Weimar in the acoustic collections of the sound archive of the Humboldt University in Berlin. They were brought back to Afghanistan and rehearsed there with Afghan master musicians and the Turkish Sufi master Kudsi Erguner.

The results will be heard at two concerts: on September 10 in the Alte Oper in Frankfurt am Main and on September 12 in the Festsaal Fürstenhaus of the Weimar University of Music. Afterwards, the Safar Ensemble will perform this special music on Afghan television in Kabul.

For five years now, Afghan and German musicians have been working together in the Safar project (which means journey) to preserve Afghan music culture and pass it on to a new generation. It is a project of the Chair of Transcultural Music Studies at the Franz Liszt University of Music Weimar. The Safar researchers are cooperating closely with the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) in Kabul.

Sol Gabetta - who studied in Basel and now teaches at the Hochschule für Musik - receives the "Instrumentalist of the Year" award. Christophe Coin, lecturer at the Schola, and the orchestra le Phénix are honored in the category best concert recording of the year for music up to and including the 18th century.

Rainer Schmidt, lecturer at the FHNW Academy of Music and member of the Hagen Quartet, is honored for the best chamber music recording for strings up to and including the 18th century.

Every year, the Deutsche Phono-Akademie honors popular musicians with the Echo Klassik music award. This year, the prize will be awarded on October 9 at the Konzerthaus Berlin.

Website of the Echo Klassik: www.echoklassik.de

The fact that the "Magic Flute" has been displaced from its previous top position is due to a new counting method in the work statistics - adaptations are now listed as separate works, especially in children's and youth theater.

Across all genres, "Tschick" has now also relegated "The Magic Flute" to second place as the most staged work after Wolfgang Herrndorf (with 52 productions) (32 productions in total). With 27 productions, "Tschick" is ahead of "The First Name" by Matthieu Delaporte/Alexandre de la Patelliere (23 productions) and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by William Shakespeare (22 productions).

In terms of the number of performances, the adaptation of the novel has even increased its lead significantly compared to the previous year. With 1156 performances, "Tschick" is well ahead of "Blue Man Group" (in second place with 476 performances), the musical "The Lion King" (421 performances, third place) and "The Magic Flute" (310, 16th place).
 

Harenberg heads the "Music and Media Art" course at the Bern University of the Arts (www.medien-kunst.ch), where he teaches composition and media theory.

According to Harenberg's statement, his guest professorship includes "teaching, critical examination of contemporary artistic and theoretical content as well as exchange between Bern University of the Arts and TU Berlin".

The visiting professorship at the TU Berlin has existed since the summer semester of 2000 and is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with the aim of internationalizing studies and teaching. It generally serves "the mediation and critical reflection of recent developments in the interaction between media technology and art, between electronic studio and music."

Michael Harenberg studied musicology in Giessen, composition in Darmstadt and completed his doctorate on musical virtualization strategies in Basel. His work focuses on digital sound culture, experimental interfaces and compositional virtuality models of the digital.