The string quartet Silly Empath has been selected for the final round of the 12th Mivos/Kanter Composition Prize in New York. At its origin, Silly Empath was a commission by the Orpheus Competition, composed for the Orpheus’ 1st prize winners Atenea Quartet. The piece was premiered at Swiss Chamber Music Festival on September 18, 2022.

For their 22/23 season tour through Germany and Belgium, I have contributed a new commission for Basel Sinfonietta – under the musical direction of Baldur Brönnimann. To be be performed by a largely blindfolded orchestra, Losing the Red Queen’s Race for orchestra was be performed alongside the Piano Concerto by Simon Steen-Andersen and György Ligeti’s San Francisco Polyphony

Nov 6, 2022, Burghof, Lörrach | Nov 30, 2022, De Singel, Antwerpen | Dec 1, 2022, De Bijloke, Gent

I have had the pleasure to work with the 2021 winners of the ORPHEUS Swiss Chamber Music Competition, Atenea Quartet, for a new string quartet in 2022. The commission comes as a result of Atenea’s selecting a composer of their choice to collaborate with them ahead of the prize-winners’ concert at the Swiss Chamber Music Festival 2022.

Premiere at Swiss Chamber Music Festival
Adelboden
19 September, 2022

In his program Earmark, composer and sound artist Gryphon Rue has made an extensive interview with me this summer. We talk about helicopter instruments, aesthetics of failure and much more, with loads of music examples. Earmark is a regular program on NYC based Montez Press Radio.

https://radio.montezpress.com/#/show/2096

In May 2022, an evening-long concert with Ensemble TZARA will take place on two evenings at Alter Botanischer Garten, Zürich. The concert is an evening-long collaboration with visual artist Marina Belobrovaja. A 30-minute composition in several parts will be immersed into an installation setting inside the botanical garden, focussing on processes of fermentation and compost – all with the help of amplified insects and interiors of human bodies.

For their upcoming series of commissions for e-guitar duos, I will be contributing a new piece with live electronics for the Duo Santorsa-Pereyra. Creating a patch focussing on erasure of the partner’s signal, the foot pedals will control the other’s sound instead of one’s own.

The work, alongside contributions by Lisa Streich, Mark Barden, Ann Cleare and others is to be premiered in 2022 in a series of concerts throughout Switzerland, Germany and France.

Recorded with Ensemble Garage Köln, Nina Guo and Mauro Hertig in Funkhaus Köln in April 2021, Mum Hum is broadcasted on WDR3 for their program “Schwesternparkmusik”. Covering the works that were supposed to be performed at Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik 2021, Harry Vogt and Kornelia Bittmann guide the listener through the festival site.

Mum Hum will receive its concert premiere at Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik in April, 2022.

MY SOCIAL MUSCLE for five performers will have its premiere on Dec 19 in Bangkok as part of the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium TMAO. It will be performed by members of TACETi ensemble. The work is a co-commission with Forum Neue Musik Luzern, which will host its Swiss premiere on April 10/11, 2021.

Guided by a voice that oscillates between instructions of a yoga session, a photo shoot and a gym workout, the five performers become a flexible muscle of sound. Sometimes in the middle of the audience, sometimes widely spread around it, they distribute contracting patterns over changing distances. With the small differences triggered by the speed of sound, the tightly knight patterns start to flicker with increasing space between the performers. My Social Muscle replays the ritual of amassing social capital – through movement and pose – using a body that vibrates over the whole festival site. The muscle becomes a metaphor for the physical and mental effort of self-representation in public constellations. And amid the audience’s guided movement in between the musicians, they become part of that muscle, experiencing its activity from the inside.

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Irina Ungureanu, Soprano
Rafael Rütti, Piano
December 8, 2020, 20:30

Kunstraum Walcheturm

Program:
8 miniatures for soprano and piano
By Nik Bärtsch, Dennis Bäsecke-Beltrametti, Léo Collin, Mauro Hertig, Vera Kappeler, Linnéa Racine aka Evelinn Trouble, Julian Sartorius and Franziska Staubli

György Kurtág – Requiem Po Drugu op. 26 (1987)

A concert by ignm zürich