PROJECT 2022-2023

Participants:

Project leader:

Stefan Hakenberg

Composers:

Haruki Noda

Bernhard Plechinger

Anna Dobrucka

Giuseppe Gammino

Sharleen Revia

Ramsey Sadaka

Sebastiano Beozzo

Leonardo Castellani

Musicologists:

Marcus Zagorski

Milijana Pavlović

Performers:

El Cimarrón Ensemble

The 2023 edition is connected to this year's international conference Nature in Musical Modernism since Mahler. Under the direction of the composer Stefan Hakenberg, a workshop was set up in Toblach in 2022 for the practical, creative and site-specific exploration of the research centre's conference themes. It offers a group of young composers the opportunity to engage more intensively with Mahler directly in Toblach on the one hand and with their own relationship to his work and influence on the other. The workshop thus serves to share the fascination with Mahler with today's younger composers. The presentation of this concert makes it possible for a wider audience to experience Mahler's undoubtedly great inspirational power in new compositions. In this way, fresh listening perspectives on Mahler can be opened up and reflections on Mahler's creative processes can be deepened in communication with compositional practice. Running and developing a composition workshop directly in the place where such outstanding works as Das Lied von der Erde were created gives the Mahler tradition an ideal space to influence music that is currently being created in many respects.

Our composition workshop opens up an inviting, locally rooted, living bridge to Mahler's art form for the community of Toblach, its musicians and its music-loving guests. The composers asked to contribute to the concert Young Composers and Gustav Mahler in Toblach have been nominated by composition professors in the EUREGIO Tyrol / South Tyrol / Trentino and neighbouring regions. Thanks to a travel grant from the Wirth Institute in Edmonton, Alberta, directed by Alexander Carpenter, a young composer from Canada will be able to contribute to the concert of the composers' group for the first time this year.

Special thanks for their generous support to Il-Ryun Chung in Darmstadt, Fabio Cifariello Ciardi in Trento, Moritz Eggert in Munich, Karlheinz Essl in Vienna, Owen Underhill in Vancouver, Heinrich Unterhofer in Bolzano and Riccardo Vaglini in Venice!

Each of the seven composers focussed in particular on one movement from Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 3. In a way, the resulting concerto is a running commentary on Mahler's work.

We have dedicated two contrasting compositions to the 4th movement of the symphony, the one in which Mahler deals musically with the programme item "What human tells me".

The new works will be performed by an ensemble under the direction of Clemens Heil, in which the outstanding Pustertal Valley musicians of the Blechzinnen will play together with guest soloists from the wider Alpine region, who have joined forces in the Halle-based El Cimarrón Ensemble.