The jury ─ consisting of three internal and two external jury members ─ was most impressed by the concept, according to a press release from the city. The jury was particularly impressed by the uniqueness of the offer and the fact that the house is once again being used by children.

It is planned that concerts by the Zurich Boys' Choir as well as school concerts by the girls' choir or instrumental ensembles will be held in Haus Sonnenberg. This will also make the building accessible to a wider public. "Cantaleum Zurich" also fits in well with the listed building; the new use requires only a few structural adjustments.

The aim of the privately run school is "to provide high-quality, child-oriented educational and musical support for 4 to 16-year-olds". It is based on the curriculum of the Canton of Zurich. The school will be bilingual (German and English) and organized as an all-day school. It is designed for 50 to 120 pupils.

Haus Sonnenberg was built in 1911 as an orphanage and was used by the Zurich Children's and Youth Homes Foundation (zkj) until 2015. The city put the new use and operation out to tender in November 2014. Five applications were submitted by March 2015. The aim of the tender was to find a self-sustaining, long-term use including an operator for the entire Sonnenberg building.
 

Both contracts are for five years, writes Lucerne Festival. Pierre Boulez, the Academy's founder, will remain in close contact with Wolfgang Rihm, Matthias Pintscher and the Festival team as Honorary President. The Lucerne Festival Academy has served as a training campus in the field of 20th and 21st century music for twelve years. It offers further training for around 120 instrumentalists aged between 18 and 32 as well as for young conductors and composers. Matthias Pintscher helped shape the academy this summer for the third time as a lecturer and conductor, including on the "Day for Pierre Boulez".

The change in management will also be accompanied by modifications to the program: from 2016, a new composition seminar is to be introduced as a workshop in which young composers can work directly on their works with young international musicians. In this way, the promotion of composers will be given an additional focus at the academy in future.

Wolfgang Rihm had already taken over the artistic direction of the Roche Young Commissions this year: Two young composers will receive commissions for works that will be developed over a period of two years as part of the academy and premiered during the summer festival. In addition, master classes for conductors and ensembles are still planned as an integral part of the academy.

In summer 2016, Principal Conductor Matthias Pintscher and the Academy Orchestra will rehearse Stravinsky's Firebird, Mark Andre's "hij 1" and György Ligeti's "San Francisco Polyphony" and present the works in a concluding concert.

Pintscher will also conduct the Ensemble intercontemporain in the academy's opening concert. Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki and American conductor Alan Gilbert will also be conducting the Academy Orchestra. Percussionist Martin Grubinger and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter will also perform as soloists with the Academy Orchestra.

In Malpensa, Adina and Nemorino (sung by Vittorio Grigolo) flirt in the airport restaurant Rossopomodoro. For one evening, Adina is the owner and Nemorino is the waiter. Dulcamara is flown in and, with a bit of luck, we see him land in his own plane. The chorus moves between restaurant, sky lounge and security gate. Presenters Annette Gerlach and Neri Marcorè will accompany the performance.

The performance can be seen on the cultural channel Arte Concert on the same day. In addition, the new 360° technology will be available from the beginning of September, inviting viewers to take a panoramic view of Milan, La Scala and the airport. A very elaborately produced 360° video will show viewers a best of the opera event a good two weeks after the performances.

A few years ago, Swiss television (including with Vittorio Grigolo) realized similar productions in Zurich's main railway station, in a suburb of Bern and in the center of Basel.
 

Forty years ago, Gerd Albrecht, then chief conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, called the Swiss Youth Music Competition (SJMW) into life. This event will be celebrated on September 13 with a matinee at 11 a.m. in the small hall of the Tonhalle Zurich. Prizewinners from four decades will be performing. Fabio di Càsola, Thomas Grossenbacher, Benjamin Engeli, Anne-Laure Pantillon, Salomo Schweizer, Nathalie Blaser, Florian Abächerli, the Bazar Quartet and Jean-Sélim Abdelmoula will bring classical music to life. There will be jazz with Tapiwa Svosve and Leandro Irarragorri and, finally, rock & pop with the band "The Pixel" in the foyer.

In between, Andreas Wegelin, President of the SJMW Foundation, André Helfenstein, representing the main partner Credit Suisse, and Bobby Keller, Honorary President of the SJMW Foundation, will speak. And at the end, at 1 p.m., there will be an aperitif to toast the anniversary.

Radio SRF 2 Kultur will broadcast Andreas Müller-Crepon's report on this anniversary matinee on October 22nd between 8pm and 10pm.

In recent years, the canton of Basel-Stadt has found that public demand for the six afternoon performances of the Basel Tattoo has been decreasing, as these are seen as less attractive than the evening performances. Now the event concept is to be optimized without placing an additional burden on the neighbourhood or local residents, as the canton asserts.

The Government Council has complied with the organizers' request for two additional event days each in 2016 and 2017. In return, the number of afternoon performances was reduced from six to three, resulting in a program reduced by one performance in total. A maximum of eleven evening performances are planned (previously nine). The previous six afternoon performances will be reduced by three. One of the remaining three performances on a Sunday afternoon will be specially geared towards children.

With around 120,000 visitors and a total of 1000 participants from all five continents, the Basel Tattoo is the most important open-air festival in Basel. It is now the second largest tattoo in the world.
 

Smirnov was also awarded the audience prize. The Russian won over the jury and audience with his renditions of the tricky composition "Le mani del violonista" by Hugues Dufourt and the second violin concerto by Dimitri Shostakovitch.

Yuliia Van also received the Young Jurors Award. Dmitry Smirnov also received the Best Compulsory Piece Award. The jury was made up of Enzo Restagno (President), Hugues Dufourt, Dong-Suk Kang, Tsugio Tokunaga, Raimund Trenkler (replacing Natalia Gutman, who had to cancel for health reasons), Pavel Vernikov and Milan Vitek.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1994, Dmitry Smirnov is a student of Elena Zajtseva at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in his native city. He has been studying at the Lausanne Academy of Music since September 2011. He made his debut at New York's Carnegie Hall in 2007.

Daria Korotkova, a student at the Bern University of the Arts, qualified for the final concert in the courtyard of Murten Castle in an internal preliminary round and two public competition rounds and impressed the jury. At the subsequent award ceremony, she was awarded first prize, a soloist concert at the Murten Classics 2016 festival and a prize of CHF 2,000. Second prize went to Nataliia Shaposhnyk from Ukraine and third prize to Shintaro Kawahara from Japan.

According to the organizers, 29 pianists took part in the Valiant Forum Piano 2015. Swiss citizens or foreigners enrolled at a Swiss university were eligible to take part. Promoting young musicians is an important goal of the Murten Classics festival. In collaboration with Valiant Bank, youth orchestras and youth choirs have performed at the Valiant Forum in the past. This year, a competition for young pianists took place for the first time.

www.murtenclassics.ch

With Joseph Haydn's Creation The third season of the opera went down in a rousing performance under René Jacobs at the end of August. Early Music Festival in Basel to an end. It had begun eight days earlier with J. S. Bach's First Brandenburg Concerto with the ensembles Café Zimmermann and Ripieni Festivi. Bach and Haydn were also the cornerstones of the festival, which was dedicated to the decades between the Baroque and Viennese Classical periods in numerous concerts, lectures and city tours.

Peter Reidemeister, the former, long-standing director of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (SCB), had organized the festival for the third time as artistic director together with the energetic entrepreneur Renato Pessi and cleverly and knowledgeably put together a programme of outstanding quality. It was supported by the Association for the Promotion of Basel Graduates in the Field of Early Music. Around a third of the funding came from the public purse and two thirds from foundations and private sponsors.

Reidemeister conceived the three editions of the festival as a trilogy of musical transitional periods, always with reference to Basel. For example, the first festival in 2011 focused on the music of the Basel Council and the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Two years later, he showed the juxtaposition of traditional polyphony and "modern" monody around 1600. From Baroque to Classical he now shed light on a long-neglected era. It is only in recent decades that scholars and musicians have turned their attention to this exciting period, rich in inner contradictions, in which the bold harmonic and formal experiments of Bach's sons and other stormy and turbulent composers and the simpler, more intimate tones of Empfindsamkeit stood alongside the "gallant" style of Rococo, in which existing genres, such as opera, were reformed and new ones, such as the string quartet and melodrama, emerged.

Reidemeister emphasized in conversation that this change was not a break, that the old lived on alongside the new. This could be experienced in a concert by the Quatuor Mosaïques with string quartets by Matthias Georg Monn, Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven, which contain fugues and thus integrate the baroque form par excellence into the new genre. The four musicians played in a highly differentiated manner and with great intensity; the subtle interpretation of the Capriccio from Haydn's C major quartet 20/2 was particularly gripping.

Another highlight was provided by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and harpsichordist Andreas Staier with luminous performances of suites and concerti; juxtaposed works by father Johann Sebastian and son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach made the change in style immediately clear. A concert with the freely improvising keyboard musician Dirk Börner and recitalist Roswitha Schilling was dedicated to the clavichord, a favorite instrument of the era.

Even opera was not missing from the varied program: under the direction of Daniela Dolci, the Basel baroque ensemble Musica fiorita performed Domenico Cimarosa's Buffa L'Impresario in angustie light-footed and with a lot of humor. The performance of the melodrama was a journey through time Ariadne on Naxos by Georg Benda, a theatrical hit of its time. Sigrid T'Hooft, a specialist in historical stage practice, had staged it in the style of the era, with more musical than psychological-realistic declamation and rampant baroque gestures. Franziska Ernst as Ariadne and Meinhardt Möbius as Theseus were not only excellent speakers, but had also internalized the sign language to such an extent that there was nothing unnatural about their elegant interpretation.

Talented graduates of the Schola Cantorum presented themselves in a series of lunchtime concerts. The violinist Plamena Nikitassova excelled in highly virtuoso sonatas by Gaspard Fritz from Geneva and the harpist Giovanna Pessi played soft and soulful music by the Bohemian Johann Baptist Krumpholtz, which already points far ahead into the Romantic period.

Special attention was paid to Basel's musical life in the 18th century. The focus was on the music collection of the merchant Lucas Sarasin (1730-1802), unfortunately only a third of which has been preserved, in whose baroque city palace, the "Blue House" on Rheinsprung, concerts were regularly held in which he himself took part. Some of these could be heard in the concert. And this year's festival CD released by the ARS Produktionen label A guest at the Blue House with the young ensemble Der musikalische Garten, which was formed at the Schola Cantorum, brings music from Sarasin's collection.

With the end of his trilogy, Reidemeister stepped down as Artistic Director. The continued existence of the festival is therefore uncertain. Fortunately, Pessi is prepared to continue the series - probably on a smaller scale - and is in contact with possible successors.

Details about the festival
festtage-basel.ch

After 45 years, the Künstlerhaus Boswil requires structural adaptations, writes the Canton of Aargau. The foundation is also planning to build a church foyer in order to offer the public contemporary visitor facilities (including sanitary facilities) in bad weather. The conversion of the historic Boswil Sigristenhaus, which dates back to 1675, envisages the creation of two rehearsal rooms and music studios, offices, storage and archive rooms as well as five guest rooms. 

With the contribution from the Swisslos fund, the cantonal government of Aargau is supporting the commitment of private individuals and foundations who are helping to finance the modernization: Around 2.5 million has already been raised through personal funds, foundations and private individuals. The previously used studio building is being sold to the local community of Boswil for the establishment of a village museum.
 

The need for selective support in structural development was expressed by various parties in the cultural dialogs of the Canton of Bern in 2013/14. With the launch of the 2015 "Impulse Contributions" funding accent, the Bern Office for Culture is responding to this need. Cultural institutions have until December 14, 2015 to submit their structural or strategic projects.

The selection of the winning projects and the amount of the respective impulse contributions are determined by a jury with a broad range of expertise. In order to strengthen cultural diversity in the canton, preference is given to impulse projects from cultural institutions outside the urban centers.

With the Canton of Bern Culture Day, the Department of Education has continued the cultural dialog that has been held in all regions in recent years. The regular exchange between politicians and the administration with cultural professionals, cultural institutions and those interested in culture follows "the conviction that the right priorities can only be set in cultural policy in a joint process", writes the canton. Over 200 people from the entire cultural spectrum accepted the invitation and discussed the further development of cultural policy in the Volkshaus Biel.
 

Travel guides rightly rave about the Amalfi Coast as one of the most beautiful coasts in the world. Nowhere else will you find more breathtaking views. Artists have always traveled there to find inspiration for their works. The Italian Flute Society, under the artistic direction of Salvatore Lombardi, organized the major musical event on the campus of the University of Salerno from 2 to 8 August. The whimsical word invention "falaut" is a playful combination of flute and some syllables of solmization, which goes back to Guido of Arezzo.

Stimulate conversations
One of the core ideas of the festival is to invite renowned artists in the field to perform in varied programs with the course participants and also to involve the next generation. This year, pupils, students, teachers and lecturers came from countries including Russia, China, Korea, Japan, the USA, Spain, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland. The program shows how flexible the instrument is and how extensive the repertoire is. There is jazz and contemporary music, music from the Baroque to the Romantic period. There were also courses for guitar, harp, violin and double bass. There were suggestions for everyone, from amateur flutists to semi-professionals and professionals. One of the main aims of the Flute Society is to bring as many interested people together as possible.

Personal lecturers
This summer camp has an interesting concept: a personal instructor is selected when you register. He or she is the first point of contact throughout the week. He or she will give you lessons that are organized very differently by the instructors. Some teachers are available to the students all day, others have individual and class lessons spread throughout the day or concentrated lessons. Participants have the opportunity to attend and listen to all classes. Individual lessons with other teachers are also possible on request.
There are also three public master classes per day. The lecturers teach in a large lecture hall in front of an interested audience. The topics are usually freely chosen. Sometimes, however, special subjects are covered, such as piccolo, Alexander technique, orchestration, etc. So you circulate around all day and choose what interests you most. In addition, the numerous lecturers present their impressive skills in concerts at lunchtime and in the evening. The standard was usually dizzyingly high.

Passion as the key to success
As you can imagine, there is a concentrated load of knowledge, experience and expertise. The atmosphere is relaxed and friendly. On the first day of the course, there was still general confusion as to who was where. It was also easy to get lost on the university's large campus. So you joined a group of people and almost by magic, students and teachers appeared in the right place. Before you knew it, there were flutes, violins and plucks coming from every room. A program booklet with all the necessary information about the festival was distributed in the afternoon of the first day. From then on there was order and clarity. An organizational masterpiece.

The summer camp as it is today has grown slowly. It all started 10 years ago with a normal summer course. The location has always changed, but it has always taken place in the Salerno area. Slowly, the event grew to its current size. Last year it was held at the University of Salerno for the first time. 70 flautists traveled there. This year there were already 200 flautists and 50 other instrumental musicians. Of these, 40% were foreigners. A worldwide network is thus maintained and expanded. The feedback was consistently positive. Festival organizer Salvatore Lombardi is convinced: "The key to success in flute playing is passion.

www.falaut.it

"Seismographic Sounds - Visions of a New World" is the name of the exhibition at Aarau's Forum Schlossplatz. It lives up to its title from behind the first door: when you open it, you are confronted with an almost two-metre-wide LED wall on which scenes from Africa, surfboard sequences and kissing lips shake hands in rapid succession - and quite loudly. It is a first look behind the scenes of current global music creation.

The idea for "Seismographic Sounds" came about a year and a half ago, at the suggestion of Anna Bürkli, co-curator of the Solothurn Künstlerhaus S11. The exhibition was originally supposed to celebrate its vernissage there, but: "The idea kept growing and soon needed more space than S11 could offer," says Thomas Burkhalter, who developed the show together with Theresa Beyer and Hannes Liechti - in collaboration with their international network Norient.

At the heart of the exhibition, which covers a good 200 square meters, are pointed, shrill and controversial music videos, tracks and sound art from over 50 countries. These are daring works that have been created outside of common social norms, explains Burkhalter. "The result is a mixture of our point of view and that of 250 journalists, bloggers and scientists." Gradually, more and more material from countries as diverse as Bolivia, Israel and Ghana was sent in, sometimes even unsolicited. The quality of the submissions was astonishingly high, says Burkhalter and Beyer adds: "The project confirmed our feeling that there are countless musicians all over the world who express themselves with a great deal of knowledge and urgency in new artistic formats."

In order for "Seismographic Sounds" to be created, it was necessary for the creators to go to their personal limits and combine their roles as project managers, curators, fundraisers and editors. "Up to 100 emails a day were the norm," recalls Beyer. Efforts that bore fruit and amounted to a collage that dug beneath the surface and revealed new trends in music. "For example, we need to get away from the image that African artists absolutely want to break into the Anglo-American market," emphasizes Burkhalter. Nowadays, it is sometimes more lucrative for many musicians to establish themselves at home.

Based on the six themes of Money, Loneliness, Desire, Exotica, War and Belonging, visitors have the opportunity to experience the exhibition as an overall audiovisual composition. According to Beyer, these thematic highlights emerged when viewing the approximately 2000 clips. However, the fact that the motif of romantic love appeared less frequently than those mentioned surprised the two curators themselves.

If you were to take in every snippet of "Seismographic Sounds", it would take around eight hours to see and hear everything. A wealth that allows the visitor to immerse themselves in detail. Videos such as the one by Bad Copy can be watched in several cinema boxes that offer space for a handful of viewers. The Serbs fuse hard rap with images of children plagued by civil war with big guns and hard faces. La Bala" by Los Tigres Del Norte from Mexico is not quite so obviously about gun battles. Their clip begins in a familiar way, but ends in the death of a band. South African Simiso Zwane's "Allblackblackkat" offers something lighter, with mystical images emerging from a swimming pool.

While you can listen to various audio collages and mixtapes such as "Aarau in the 80s" in the lounge, numerous podcasts offer in-depth insights into the everyday lives of musicians outside the mainstream. For example, Israeli sound artist Meira Asher talks about her musical confrontation with the militarization of her country. One listening station next door, the Indonesian hard rock band Burgerkill complains: "It's difficult for artists to make a living here." A statement that crops up again and again in various forms. Even more frequently, however, one is confronted with the attitude that everything is being done to maintain a public presence with one's songs.

The show, which is accompanied by a book of the same name, illustrates how different and yet similar the various music scenes around the world are. Seismographic Sounds" particularly encourages visitors to embark on a journey of discovery in search of new sounds and impressions - both inside and outside the exhibition.

Groszer has "decisively shaped the Zurich Opera House with great artistic vision, great passion and the necessary perseverance". With his "gentle modesty and his clever, confident manner, his humor and his enthusiasm", he knew how to motivate his employees in all areas to deliver top performances, the opera house continued.

Groszer was director of the Landestheater Tübingen from 1964 to 1967, director of the Stadttheater St. Gallen from 1967 to 1972, general director of the Staatstheater Braunschweig from 1972 to 1978, director of the Staatstheater Wiesbaden from 1978 to 1986 and director of the Opernhaus Zürich from 1986 to 1991.

The hip-hop dance group from the Protestant community in Davos has set up outside next to the brass band. The mixed choir is positioned behind a piano trio in the bar of the Hotel Schweizerhof. At 5 pm sharp, everyone starts singing and playing at the same time. Although the hip-hopper dancers have their ghetto blasters with them with the appropriate music, they are also accompanied by the marches of the Davos Music Society. Brahms' first piano trio meets folk songs in Swiss dialect. The Mozart divertimento of the string orchestra in the foyer is accompanied by a somewhat penetrating rattle. Everyone is serious and fully engaged. The audience moves freely between the ensembles and solo musicians - across staircases and corridors. Bratwurst is served outside. John Cage's Musicircus The opening weekend of the 30th Davos Festival is a small happening. Conventional concert patterns are broken up. The boundaries between musical styles have been erased. This is very important to the artistic director Reto Bieri. "For me, this performance is also an interesting social study. The music groups are completely free in their interpretation. It's exciting to observe who is more reserved or who simply plays louder in order to be heard."

The seven wind players of the Austrian formation Federspiel wander between the individual ensembles and focus on working together. "Let's improvise", trumpeter Simon Zöchbauer asks the woodwind trio of the Spanish Azahar ensemble. The key and tempo are briefly clarified. And the Rondino finale of Erwin Schulhoff's Divertissement is heard in a completely new version - with trumpet repetitions and an organ point in the trombone. What happens here on a small scale also happens on a large scale. Young, highly talented musicians get to know each other and develop something new together. Around 70 music students from 20 European countries are on site for the entire two-week festival. "Something special has to happen here in Davos. We need time for that. And boredom. Spectacular boredom," remarks the artistic director in the press conference.

In addition to the 45 chamber music concerts at twelve different locations, including the train station and Stafelalp, there are also spontaneous sessions in the hotel lobby, for example when a few string players play jazz or the members of the chamber choir, which invites guests to "Sing for everyone" every morning at 10 a.m., delight the hotel guests at midnight with artfully arranged folk songs.

The slightly increased total budget for 2015 amounts to around 630,000 Swiss francs. At 65%, the proportion of sponsors is above average. 24 % of the budget is financed by ticket prices, while subsidies amount to 11%. In Davos, everything is produced in-house and exclusively - an important unique selling point in the interchangeable festival business. The proportion of new music is high.

Bieri's predecessor Graziella Contratto, who directed the chamber music festival from 2007 to 2013, had also brought a breath of fresh air to Davos, bringing young early music specialists to the festival and opening up the repertoire to jazz. Dance courses in a carpentry workshop, hotel concerts, conducting for children, hiking concerts and the recital on the Schatzalp were among her innovations.

Bieri wants to anchor the festival in the heart of life and also attract audiences who have not previously found their way to concerts in the well-known climatic health resort. This is why the Parsenn Yodel Choir and the Alphorners Davos-Klosters are also taking part in John Cage. That's why there is a listening tour through the forest for children and young reporters reporting on the festival. The concert motto "Roundabout" is deliberately taken from everyday life. Many Swiss towns are characterized by traffic circles. Davos doesn't even have a traffic light. The entire festival program is about repetitions and cycles, junctions and even the odd dead end that leads nowhere artistically.

"RoundAbout" is the name of the opening concert in the rather dull, carpeted hall of the Hotel Schweizerhof. Martin Meuli, head physician at Zurich Children's Hospital, gives a refreshing lecture on cell division and metabolic cycles. And the circles are also explored musically. Joe Zawinul's The Harvest ends as it began - with tone-bound rhythms that the musicians of Federspiel drum onto the mouthpieces of their instruments. Schubert's Andante from the string quartet Death and the girlThe variations of the piece, which the young musicians of Cuarteto Gerhard are not quite up to, are cyclical in nature. The spoked music by Basel artist and instrument inventor Lukas Rohner on a converted bicycle is original, but does not lead to a clear artistic statement.

The composer in residence is the French composer Marc-André Dalbavie. He composes the rhythmically concise, thoroughly melodic-tonal Piano Trio No. 1 in a captivating interpretation by Gilles Grimaitre (piano), Jonian Ilias Kadesha (violin) and Vasthi Hunter (cello). During the interval, you stand in the backyard of the hotel in the dark, sipping your glass of champagne. The glamor factor tends towards zero. Like many other hotels, the Schweizerhof is closed in summer.

How well the summer balance turns out depends heavily on the weather. This year, there were 16 percent fewer overnight stays by Germans due to the high Swiss franc exchange rate. "However, we were able to make up for this with guests from other countries such as Poland, Hungary and Scandinavia," says Paul Petzold, Head of Tourism at Davos-Klosters. He does not believe in special discounts for Germans, as offered by some Swiss resorts. "A huge mistake! How can we justify something like that to our other guests?" In addition, Davos is one of the top destinations where visitors are less price-sensitive.

The Davos Festival has hardly any effect on the number of overnight stays here. There is no real festival audience that comes here for the concerts. Most concert-goers are Davos or Zurich residents who have a second home in the climatic health resort at 1560 meters above sea level. Or holidaymakers who are already in Graubünden anyway. They come to the open-air concert in the Kurpark despite the rain, where the cheerful, highly musical Federspiel brass players manage the balancing act between yodeling and jazz and can even sound like a Mexican mariachi ensemble. Around 200 guests stand with their umbrellas between the wet beer benches and listen intently to what the likeable guys from the neighboring country can combine.

"Young Artists in Concert" is the subtitle of the chamber music festival founded by Michael Haefliger in 1986. There are many talents to discover, such as the formidable Dudok Kwartet from Amsterdam, which performs Brahms' second string quartet in the Alexander Chapel with wonderful transparency and homogeneity. "But we also have some more experienced musicians here, such as the members of the Amaryllis Quartet, who act as teachers and sit at the first desks in the Davos Festival Camerata. This exchange is important to me," says Reto Bieri.

The unconventional 40-year-old Swiss doesn't have a cell phone. It only distracts him. What's more, without a cell phone, agreements are highly binding. But you can still find him. "I'm always circling around here during the festival anyway." At the Kreisleriana concert, works by the distantly related Fritz and Georg Kreisler come together. Schumann's Kreisleriana must not be missing in the somewhat colorless interpretation by Oliwia Grabowska. The Amaryllis Quartet roughens up Beethoven's String Quartet op. 59/3. And they deliver a highly dramatic finish that makes the older audience, which is made up of young festival musicians, scream.

The new platform www.kulturraum.sh aims to promote dialog between creative artists, event organizers and the public. Organizers can present their cultural offerings and network with creative artists and other organizers. Cultural professionals receive a free web presence. Providers of rooms that are rented out for cultural purposes in the Schaffhausen region can publish their offers. The new platform was designed by the municipal cultural service at the suggestion of the municipal cultural commission.

Kulturkiste.sh shows the cultural offerings for children and young people in the Schaffhausen region. Organizers, creative artists and art educators can provide information about their work. Teachers at all levels can find cultural education offers in the region. Families can use the agenda to find out about theater, concerts, workshops, stories, exhibitions and much more that is explicitly tailored to them.

The new platform was designed in line with the Schaffhausen government's legislative goal for the years 2013-2016, which focuses on promoting projects and initiatives for cultural outreach to all social classes and age groups in the area of cultural promotion.