Christopher Peter

On 19 August, the world premiere of Christian Jost’s An die Hoffnung will be performed by Yutaka Sado and the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich with tenor Klaus Florian Vogt, opening the 10th annual Grafenegg Festival. Jost was commissioned to write An die Hoffnung as Composer in Residence at this year's festival. The residency will include performances of several of his existing compositions and he will also appear as a conductor and leader of the young composers' workshop INK STILL WET from 1-5 September.

An die Hoffnung—A modern allusion to Beethoven

In 1804, Beethoven set Christoph August Tiedge’s poem ‘An die Hoffnung’ (from Urania) to music, revisiting and revising the vocal work nine years later (Op. 94). Beethoven’s song provides the starting point for Jost’s orchestral work of the same name, which maintains much of Beethoven’s harmonic and sung material integrated into a newly composed orchestral score. Jost’s orchestration further draws from Beethoven by instrumentally mirroring his Symphony No. 9, which will also feature in the opening concert of the festival.

The agitated, rhythmically driven composition begins with an orchestral landscape characterised by minor thirds, expanding orchestrally on Beethoven’s fragile motif of ‘hope’ and interweaving with Tiedge’s final lines: ‘whether an angel waiting above will count my tears.’ – Christian Jost

Other performances of Jost's music at the Grafenegg Festival include the world premiere of another new work, a Fanfare for 9 wind instruments on 19 August, CocoonSymphonie on 25 August with the composer conducting, lautlos for solo cello on 28 August played by Georgy Goryunov, and Portrait for solo violin solo played by Sophie Kolarz-Lakenbacher on 10 September.

• Christian Jost - Profil


• Grafenegg Festival

On 26 June, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ last large-scale work, The Hogboon, will be premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle, joined by the London Symphony Chorus, LSO Discovery Chorus and Guildhall School Musicians at the Barbican Hall, London. The work was commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and Philharmonie Luxembourg.



The Hogboon is a children’s opera which tells the story of Magnus, a young Orkney Islander who, with the help of a friendly Hogboon (a household troll), sets out to defend the village from the feared sea monster, Nuckleavee.

Completed shortly before his death in March,The Hogboon was particularly close to Maxwell Davies' heart as an Orkney resident and a passionate advocate for music education. The composer wrote the libretto himself, based on an Orkney folk tale. He took great pleasure in creating a work for combined professional and student forces, assigning the children’s choir the roles of the angry sea monster and the witch’s kittens. The opera also bears an ecological moral: we must take care of nature if we wish to live alongside it.

Bearing in mind the involvement of children and students, I have not written down to them with any condescension – rather – I have written up, knowing, from long experience, that, taken absolutely seriously, children and students are wickedly perceptive, and not to be taken for granted. I have attempted to make the masque work on several levels, of interest to adults, students and children, with weavings into the work’s verbal and musical textures diverse layers of meaning not least to do with our accommodations with Nature, and our present ecological problems.– Maxwell Davies

The Hogboon can next be seen in Luxembourg with the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra in May 2017. Following the premiere of The Hogboon in London, a free memorial event in Maxwell Davies' honour will take place at St John's Smith Square on 27 June. Included in the programme are two of his last works, The Golden Solstice (2016) for choir and organ and String Quartet Movement 2016, receiving its premiere performance. For more information and booking go to: https://www.sjss.org.uk/events/max-celebration.

• Sir Peter Maxwell Davies - profile


• The Hogboon - workdetails


• Barbican Hall - information on the premiere The Hogboon


• St. John's Smith Square - information on the memorial event

On June 17, Cincinnati Opera presents the world premiere of Gregory Spears’s Fellow Travelers, with a libretto by Greg Pierce based on the 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon. The world premiere production is directed by Kevin Newbury. Fellow Travelers was developed and co-commissioned by G. Sterling Zinsmeyer and Cincinnati Opera.



Fellow Travelers takes place at the height of the McCarthy era in 1950’s Washington, D.C. Recent college graduate Timothy Laughlin is eager to join the crusade against communism, and a chance encounter with handsome State Department official Hawkins Fuller leads to Tim’s first job—and his first love affair with a man. Drawn into a maelstrom of deceit, Tim struggles to reconcile his political convictions and his forbidden love for Fuller.

The piece uses the love affair of Laughlin and Fuller to shed light on “the lavender scare”, an often-overlooked period of McCarthyism that resulted in the mass firings of suspected homosexuals from the United States government. “It’s about a part of our history which was almost invisible,” Spears says of Fellow Travelers, “and I think one of the things opera can do is make invisible things visible.”

The Aronoff Center for the Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio hosts ten performances running through July 10.

• Gregory Spears - profile


• Fellow Travelers - workdetails


• Cincinnati Arts Association - Informations to the performance

On 27 May, Hartmann’s Symphony No. 1 will be performed the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Kismara Pessatti under the direction of Arie van Beek in Rotterdam.

Hartmann composed his Symphony No. 1 for contralto and orchestra in 1935 but because of his political dissidence, the music was classified as degenerate. He would wait more than 10 years before the work was finally premiered in 1948. Today, Symphony No. 1 is a standard part of the new music repertoire. The work, subtitled “Versuch eines Requiems” (“Attempt at a Requiem”), was originally intended as a Cantata Lamento. By 1955, after many re-workings, the piece had matured into the symphony known today. The text is taken from poems by Walt Whitman, whose words also Paul Hindemith used in his Requiem 'for those we love'.

Symphony No. 1: music against the war

Hartmann's Symphony does not follow the classical form of four movements, but rather, five movements are structured concentrically around an instrumental middle movement (a "song without words"). This middle section contains a quotation from his anti-war opera, Simplicius Simplicissimus, in the form of theme and variation. Like many of his works, Hartmann's Symphony bears the impression of life under the Nazi regime.

He describes his motivation and feelings at the time of its composition:

Then there came 1933, with its misery and hopelessness, and with this that consistent development of violent dictatorship - the most dreadful of all crimes: the war. That year I recognised the necessity of confession, not in desperation and fear of that power, but as a counteraction to it. I told myself that freedom will win, even if we are destroyed – at least back then I believed this. At that time, I wrote my 1st String Quartet, the Poème Symphonique "Miserae" and my First Symphony with the words of Walt Whitman: 'I sit and look at all plagues of the world and at all distress and disgrace'. – Hartmann

Next month, Hartmann’s Concerto funebre for solo violin and orchestra will be performed on 4 June at the Wiener Festwochen Festival with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Klangforum Wien. On 4 and 5 July, it will also be performed by the Studio-Orchester München with conductor Christoph Adt at the Reaktorhalle in Munich.

• Karl Amadeus Hartmann - profile


• Symphony No. 1 - work details