The Hungarian conductor and violinist Takács-Nagy is considered one of the most authentic representatives of Hungarian music. He was the first to record works by the composer Sándor Veress, who teaches in Bern. In 2005, he founded the string ensemble Camerata Bellerive, which is also the resident orchestra of the Festival de Bellerive in Geneva. In 2006 he became musical director of the Weinberg Chamber Orchestra and a year later of the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra (VFKO).

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO) is a professional chamber orchestra based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In collaboration with five artistic partners, the orchestra's musicians present more than 130 concerts and educational programs each year at over 14 venues in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. Past partners include Joshua Bell, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Douglas Boyd, Edo de Waart and Roberto Abbado.

According to the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, this edition presents the entire surviving oeuvre of the epoch-making composer, supplemented by a list of works and sources as well as a volume of letters and documents.

After the Gluck-Gesellschaft's first attempts to publish a critically validated edition of Gluck's works, Rudolf Gerber began preparatory work in 1943 on a new Gluck Complete Edition (GGA) based on comprehensive source research and collection. With the adoption of the GGA into the academy program in 1978 and the establishment of the project at the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, the financing of the long-term project was secured.

In addition to the research center in Mainz, the GGA has had another one at the Institute for Musicology at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main since 2011. There has also been a Gluck research center in Austria since 1966, which is located in the Department of Art, Music and Dance Studies at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg.

Link to the complete edition: www.gluck-gesamtausgabe.de

Irène Schweizer, born in Schaffhausen in 1941, first played in a Dixie band at the age of 14, but then switched to modern jazz. Initially, she was inspired by the African-American free jazz movement. Later, however, she influenced the women's music movement more than almost any other female musician.

In 1983 she founded the European Women's Improvising Group. She played regularly with the women's trio Les Diaboliques with the British singer Maggie Nicols and the French bassist Joëlle Léandre or in a duo with the Zurich saxophonist Co Streiff. In 1986, she was involved in the organization of the first women's jazz festival in Switzerland, the Canaille Festival at the Rote Fabrik in Zurich.

Irène Schweizer was awarded the Culture Prize of the Canton of Zurich and the Swiss Music Prize in 2018. She retired from active concert life in 2021 for health reasons. She has now died after a long illness at the age of 83.

The jury of the Young Talent Award praised Kobekina's virtuosity and her special expression: she combines technical skill with warmth of heart. Last but not least, "the playful ease with which she moves through different stylistic periods" was convincing.
The Leonard Bernstein Award is endowed with 10,000 euros. Previous recipients include Lang Lang, Martin Grubinger, Alisa Weilerstein, Krzystof Urbánski, Isata Kanneh-Mason and, most recently, Vivi Vassileva.

Kobekina had made headlines in Switzerland in 2022 because she was uninvited at short notice by the Ittingen Charterhouse for a concert that had already been announced because she is Russian and no Russian artists were programmed for the Ittingen Sunday concerts due to the "controversy surrounding the appearance of Russian artists in current world events in general".

Performance and audience figures are rising again. The number of all productions in the season rose to 6773 in Germany (7716 in the entire German-speaking theater, including Austria and Switzerland). According to the New Music Newspaper but also that new topics are being discussed on stage, primarily the war in Ukraine.

While musical theater lost a quarter of its audience from 2018/19 to 2022/23, drama and children's and youth theater each lost around ten percent, writes the New Music Newspaper further. These figures are taken from the Werkstatistik, for which 437 theaters from Germany, Austria and Switzerland provided their data for the 2022/23 season.

The Magic flute is the most frequently staged opera (23 productions) before Hansel and Gretel (20 productions) and The Marriage of Figaro (18 productions). Contemporary opera does not appear in the hit lists. Across all genres, the three works with the largest audiences are others: The Bochum musical Starlight Express (with 440,497), the Bad Segeberger open-air spectacle Winnetou I (with 430,321) and ARISE Grand Show from the Friedrichstadt Palast in Berlin (with 422,419).

Original article:
https://www.nmz.de/politik-betrieb/musikleben/neue-werkstatistik-202223-postpandemische-erholung

Meyer, 68, has led the Teatro alla Scala since May 2020 and his term of office expires at the end of February 2025. The current Italian government has set an age limit of 70 for the management of opera houses and other cultural institutions and aims to only allow Italians to hold these management positions.

Meyer was already Director of the Lausanne Opera House from 1994 to 1999 and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. Meyer will be joined in the fall by Julie Mestre, who has been General Director of the Orchestre des Pays de Savoie since 2020. The French violinist Renaud Capuçon has been the orchestra's Artistic Director since 2021.

The jury honored Ayse Cansu Tanrıkulu and Nick Dunston as an "extraordinary duo with impressive artistic multidimensionality and dynamic power". With playful virtuosity, the two moved between improvisation and composition, noise and folk, narrative songs and abstract sound textures. Ankara-born vocalist Ayse Cansu Tanrıkulu studied in Berlin and has been teaching at the HKB since 2023.

The SWR Jazz Prize, initiated by Joachim-Ernst Berendt, is the oldest jazz prize in Germany and will be awarded for the 44th time in 2024 by the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and Südwestrundfunk. It is endowed with 15,000 euros. The last winners in 2023 were Kathrin Pechlof, harpist, 2022: Petter Eldh, bassist, 2021: Eva Klesse, drummer, 2020: Daniel Erdmann, saxophonist, 2019: Liz Kosack, keyboardist, 2018: Sebastian Gille, saxophonist, 2017: Christian Lillinger, drummer and 2016: Julia Hülsmann, pianist.

The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra is a publicly funded symphony orchestra of the state capital of Munich. It was under the direction of Valery Gergiev between 2015 and 2022. Lahav Shani will become chief conductor from 2026. The current artistic director is still Paul Müller, who was previously artistic director of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra.

From 2001, Wiegand worked for the then new Konzerthaus Dortmund, where he founded a choir academy, set up the marketing department and helped develop sponsorship and fundraising projects. From 2005, he took over the management of the artistic operations office and concert planning. He is a jury member of the Herbert von Karajan Young Conductors Award of the Salzburg Festival and has been a regular lecturer in the Executive Master in Arts Administration program at the University of Zurich since 2019.

As part of a larger research project on the production and design of digital concert experiences, the research team conducted an online survey of 1619 people who use classical concert streams. They provided information on their socio-demographic data, their experience of using streaming platforms and their preferences regarding various possible production features of digital classical music events.

Over half belonged to the "digital concert enthusiasts". This group is open to innovative and diverse concert features that make full use of the possibilities of digitality, as well as the use of social media channels. The "digital concert purists" made up around a third. They prefer traditional concert features and on-demand streams. Around 15 percent of respondents were rather undecided about their preferences and were accordingly described as "undecided and less committed".

The results of the study were recently published in the specialist journal The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society have been published. They show that socio-demographic characteristics and music preferences have a significant, albeit weak, correlation with membership of the aforementioned audience groups. These findings suggest that clearly differentiated types of classical concert streams should be developed in order to reach the widest possible audience.

Original article:
Egermann, H., Siebrasse, A., Weining, C., O'Neill, K., Tröndle, M., & Wald-Fuhrmann, M. (2024). Developing Digital Classical Concert Stream Offerings: A Typology of Audience Preferences. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 54(3), 125-141. doi:10.1080/10632921.2024.2347397.

The 66-year-old Brazilian has canceled all commitments, including a summer course in Siena, and has given up teaching. According to a statement published on his social networks, the musician was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive brain tumor, in June. The statement states that the musician is currently receiving palliative medical care in Switzerland, where he lives.

Antonio Meneses' international career began in 1977 when he won the ARD International Competition in Munich. In 1982, he also won first prize and the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Between 1998 and 2008 he was a member of the Beaux Arts Trio. In addition to his solo performances, Antonio Meneses regularly gives master classes in Europe, America and Japan. He has been teaching at the Bern University of the Arts since October 2008.

Michel Vust has been head of the City of Biel's Department of Culture since 2018. He began his career in 2002 at the Locarno International Film Festival, where he was responsible for communications until 2009. At the same time, he was co-director of the International Festival of Fantasy Films in Neuchâtel from 2005 to 2011. In 2012, he became Head of Promotion of Digital Creation at the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia until he took over the position in Biel/Bienne in 2018. He is on the board of the Forum Culture and Economy and on the board of the Commission romande de diffusion des spectacles (Corodis).

At the beginning of the year, the Vaud State Council decided to transform the Service des affaires culturelles (SERAC) into a Directorate-General for Culture with effect from August 1, 2024. Aline Delacrétaz will manage the business ad interim. As the current head of the Strategic Tasks department at SERAC, she will have the task of ensuring the continuity of the service for two months. Vust will take up office in October.

The Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de Musique (Sacem) welcomes the judgment of the Tribunal judiciaire de Nanterre of June 28, 2024 in the proceedings brought against it by the heirs of Alexandre Benois and the legal successors of Maurice Ravel, seeking to have Alexandre Benois declared co-author, alongside Maurice Ravel, of the Boléro is recognized.

As the documents submitted by the plaintiffs did not prove that the criteria required for the recognition of such co-authorship were met, Sacem had in fact refused to recognize the Boléro can be regarded as a joint work between Maurice Ravel and Alexandre Benois.

Such recognition would have meant that the term of copyright protection for this work would have been extended until 2039 or even 2051 if, as later claimed by the Ravel estate, the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska was also a co-author of the Boléros would have been recognized.

The Nanterre court followed Sacem's reasoning and therefore dismissed the claims of the Ravel and Benois estates in their entirety, both with regard to Sacem's refusal to recognize Alexandre Benois' alleged co-authorship and with regard to the numerous errors that the estates were accusing him of.

In essence, according to the press release, the aim is to enable the canton to pay higher financial contributions to the Uri music school in future. According to the cantonal law on schools and education, voluntary music lessons are a joint responsibility of the canton and municipalities. The canton is responsible for supporting voluntary music lessons for primary and upper secondary school students through contributions. Following the referendum on the revision of the Education Act on September 25, 2022 and as part of the follow-up legislation, the ordinance on voluntary music lessons at elementary school is now also to be revised.

The consultation on the revised ordinance will last until September 26, 2024, after which the Directorate of Education and Culture will evaluate the comments. The cantonal government can then decide on how to proceed. The earliest possible date for consideration of the revised law in the cantonal parliament is February 5, 2025. If this timetable is adhered to, the revised ordinance could come into force on August 1, 2025.

According to the press release, the role of artistic director also includes an advisory function for the further development and repositioning of the tradition-steeped festival. Christoph Müller will take up his position in autumn 2025 and present his first program at the beginning of 2026.

Born in 1970, Christoph Müller is a trained cellist and has held various positions with the Basel Chamber Orchestra since 1996, including cellist and managing director. He has been the orchestra's artistic delegate and concert manager since 2011. After the 2025 edition of the festival, he will hand over the artistic direction of the Gstaad Menuhin Festival & Academy after 24 editions.

The Settimane Musicali have been part of the musical panorama of the Lake Maggiore region and Ticino since they were founded in 1946. It is a springboard for young musicians and promotes Swiss orchestras, such as the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana, which is given a special platform with two concerts a year as part of the festival.