Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini’s opera Wut (Rage) receives its first Swiss performance on 10 September at the Stadttheater Bern. Scartazzini tells the graphic story of Peter I of Portugal and his lover Inês de Castro as a fate metaphor of the modern human being. The opera, with a libretto by Christian Martin Fuchs, was premiered in 2006 in Erfurt. In Bern the producer is Dieter Kaegi, with set design by Francis O’Connor, and conducted by Dorian Keilhack. (Foto: Theater Erfurt, 2006)

Manfred Trojahn has composed Cinque sogni per Eusebius for the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra under conductor Andrey Boreyko, to be premiered on 10 September in the Tonhalle Düsseldorf together with an orchestration of Schumann’s Träumerei. The composition for the Schumann anniversary year picks up on the characteristic short form of the Romantic period. Trojahn’s Sinfonischer Satz. Allegro will be premiered by the Niedersächsisches Staatsorchester conducted by Wolfgang Bozic in Hannover on 21 November.

The Slowakian composer Ľubica Čekovská has been appointed Composer in Residence by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Altenburg-Gera for the 2010/2011 season. On 15 September her violin concerto will be premiered by the Thuringian orchestra conducted by its new music director Howard Arman, and on 20 April 2011, Ľubica Čekovská’s orchestral work “Adorations” will receive its first German performance in Altenburg. In an interview Čekovská talks about her life and composing.

As part of its “Auftakt” festival 2010, the Alte Oper Frankfurt is devoting a composer portrait to Beat Furrer. In August, the composer’s works were also featured at the Pannonhalma festival in Hungary. The Ensemble Modern launches the festival with a concert version of Begehren on 17 September, which will also be performed at the Musikfest Berlin prior to this. The Junge Deutsche Philharmonie performs Phaos für Orchester conducted by Peter Rundel on 26 September. A symposium conceived by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich about and with Beat Furrer is being held on 18 September. A CD with Furrer’s String Quartet No. 3 released on the Kairos Music label with the KNM Berlin has just been awarded a prize for an outstanding new issue by the German Record Critics’ Award.

The critical new edition of Boris Godunov, edited by Michael Rot, contains all the versions created during Modest Musorgsky’s lifetime in complete and performable form. This is being used for two prominent new productions of the opera, both of which receive their premieres in October. The first is on 5 October at the Teatro Regio di Torino (conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, director, Andrei Konchalovsky), followed on 11 October by the Metropolitan Opera New York. Director is there Stephan Wadsworth, the conductor is Valery Gergiev. The title role will be sung by one of the world’s leading basses, René Pape.