The BBVA Foundation and music label NEOS present an exclusive recording of the latest Donaueschinger Festival (“Donaueschinger Musiktage”), the world’s longest standing contemporary music festival and a prestigious showcase for  new compositional directions and techniques.

Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Donaueschinger has attracted the most outstanding composers of “new music”. Its earliest editions featured the works of the classical Vienna School composers: Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, leading representatives of serialism and/or twelve-tone music. In its second, post-war incarnation, starting in 1950, the Festival was supported by the German radio station SWR, broadcasting out of Baden Baden. This union of forces drew in young composers experimenting with new instruments and compositional techniques. Authors like Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen or Luigi Nono, who gave serialism its integral expression, or John Cage and the current known as random or unstructured music, with space for improvisation and new explorations of sound. And also recent composers of repute, including György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel, Wolfgang Rihm or Helmut Lachenmann.

The Donaueschinger Festival has now been opened up to other types of musical interpretation besides the traditional vocal-instrumental forms. Its program thus finds room for sections on music and film, multimedia projects, performance art or sound installations.

Performances by:
SWR

Composers:
Hans Thomalla
James Saunders
Arnulf Herrmann
François Sarhan

Contents:
SWR

CD Audio 

Hans Thomalla
1. Ausruff (2007) for large ensemble (17:29)

James Saunders
1. 211007 (2006/2007) for ensemble (24:49)

Arnulf Herrmann
3. Monströses Lied (11:12)

François Sarhan
4. Installation: Talks Time Nothing (00:32)
5. The Name of the Song (15:08)

Total time: 69:24