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, Donaueschingen 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 o 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:
Thomas Larcher,piano
SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg

Composers:
Ben Johnston, Isabel Mundry, Brice Pauset and Enno Poppe

CD Audio:

Isabel Mundry
1. Ich und Du for piano and orchestra (14:43)

Enno Poppe
Altbau for orchestra (17:21)
2. I (07:16)
3. II (10:05)

Brice Pauset
4. Die Tänzerin (Symphonie V) for large orchestra (14:52)

Ben Johnston
5. Quintet for groups (18:12)

Total time: 65:33