Info text: Boris Pasternak received the Nobel Prize in 1958 for his novel Doctor Zhivago, which he was forced to decline by the regime. The Czech composer Ladislav Kubík, who lives in the USA, sees the poems that Pasternak added at the end of his novel as a portrait of the poet and used this material to form his main work for tenor and orchestra. […]

Info text: Schönberg wrote “Pierrot lunaire” shortly before the development of twelve-tone music in a few days (March/June 1912) and selected 21 poems from a cycle by the French poet Albert Giraud in the German translation by Otto Erich Hartleben. There is no ongoing plot. Each poem describes a small scene, a moving image, a macabre anecdote […]

Info text: Spahlinger is not exactly known as a quick writer, but the eight years it took to write it is exceptionally long, even for his standards. The premiere of the piece was postponed five times before it was finally realized in November 2005 (Theaterhaus Stuttgart). Last but not least, Spahlinger opens up between the rubble of tonal order and the shells and new buildings of the […]

Info text: In each individual way, the composing of György Kurtág and Jörg Widmann can be understood as a constant, productive dialogue with musical suggestions from the past. In Kurtág's work, this corresponds to the wide range of design means used, which extends from the traditional triad to canonical techniques through to the handling of sound textures and finds its ideal expression in the fragmentary […]

Info text: Erhard Grosskopf: As a composer, I am like an architect who builds a house for music and hopes that the music will move into this house - not like the content into the form, but like the spirit into the soul. A musical score is usually notated so that we have the sounds vertically and the time horizontally […]

Info text: Peter Eötvös is setting the tone in the new music scene - not only as a composer, but also as a conductor and teacher. “Cap-ko” is a homage to Eötvös' great role model Bartók. This goes down to the last detail. Bartók's preference for parallel lines gave him the idea of ​​using an instrument that would make it possible to […]

Info text: When John Cage let his eyes wander over blank, white paper - in 1952, the same year that the piece "4'33" was created and he thereby promoted the realization that there can be no silence that is not rich in sound - Cage discovered one of his most radical solutions: “Suddenly I saw that the notes, all the notes, were already there.” […]

Info text: It is rare to find composers who can use sounds to tell of absolute emptiness and who, conversely, manage to give an inkling of the fullness of higher-level entities in places of virtual silence. Nikolaus Brass, born in Lindau on Lake Constance in 1949, is such an artist - a quiet, thoughtful and, in the deep sense of the word, friendly man. […]

Info text: Borboudakis: I still see myself in a tradition of piano music, without wanting to compare myself with Chopin or Schumann. For me personally, looking back at music history is very important, but I'm not looking for interpretive or compositional dogmas. I need the piano very much as a composer - not to try something out, [...]