Neue Oper Wien is an Austrian opera company based in Vienna. [1] Insight Guides cites them and the Wiener Taschenoper as "two of the independent groups which perform exclusively 20th and 21st-century opera". [2]
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall and a number of works on Jewish themes. He became a United States citizen in 1943.
Sir Harrison Birtwistle was an English composer of contemporary classical music best known for his operas, often based on mythological subjects. Among his many compositions, his better known works include The Triumph of Time (1972) and the operas The Mask of Orpheus (1986), Gawain (1991), and The Minotaur (2008). The last of these was ranked by music critics at The Guardian in 2019 as the third-best piece of the 21st century. Even his compositions that were not written for the stage often showed a theatrical approach. A performance of his saxophone concerto Panic during the BBC's Last Night of the Proms caused "national notoriety". He received many international awards and honorary degrees.
Anne Sofie von Otter is a Swedish mezzo-soprano. Her repertoire encompasses lieder, operas, oratorios and also rock and pop songs.
Ensemble Modern is an international ensemble dedicated to performing and promoting the music of contemporary composers. Formed in 1980, the group is based in Frankfurt, Germany, and made up variously of about twenty members from numerous countries.
Peter Ruzicka is a German composer and conductor of classical music. He was director of the Hamburg State Opera, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Hamburg and the Salzburg Festival. Ruzicka was managing director and Intendant of the Salzburg Easter Festival and is professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. The list of his compositions includes numerous orchestral and chamber music works as well as the opera "Celan", about the poet Paul Celan, which was premiered in Dresden in 2001. His opera "Hölderlin" had its premiere at the Berlin State Opera in 2008. Ruzicka's third opera "Benjamin", about the philosopher Walter Benjamin, was written in 2015/16 for the Hamburg State Opera and premiered in 2018.
Péter Eötvös was a Hungarian composer, conductor and academic teacher.
Omar Ebrahim is an English baritone vocalist. He specializes in the performance of contemporary classical music.
Der Kuhhandel is an operetta by Kurt Weill. The German libretto was written by Robert Vambery.
The Donaueschingen Festival, or more precisely Donaueschingen Music Days, is a three-day October event presenting new music in the town of the same name, where the Danube River starts, at the edge of the Black Forest in southern Germany. Founded in 1921, it is the oldest festival for contemporary music in the world.
Jonas Kaufmann is a German-Austrian tenor opera singer. He is best known for the versatility of his repertoire, performing a variety of opera roles in multiple languages in recital and concert each season. Some of his standout roles include Don José in Carmen, Cavaradossi in Tosca, Maurizio in Adriana Lecouvreur, Don Alvaro in La forza del destino, Siegmund in Die Walküre, and the title roles in Parsifal, Werther, Don Carlos, and Lohengrin. In 2014 The New York Times described Kaufmann as "a box-office draw, and... the most important, versatile tenor of his generation."
Hymnen is an electronic and concrete work, with optional live performers, by Karlheinz Stockhausen, composed in 1966–67, and elaborated in 1969. In the composer's catalog of works, it is No. 22.
21st-century classical music is art music in the contemporary classical tradition that has been produced since the year 2000. A loose and ongoing period, 21st-century classical music is defined entirely by the calendar and does not refer to a musical style in the sense of Baroque or Romantic music.
Oscar Strasnoy is a French-Argentine composer, conductor and pianist. Although primarily known for his stage works, the first of which Midea (2) premiered in Spoleto in 2000, his principal compositions also include two secular cantatas and several song cycles.
Scott Voyles is an American conductor.
Robert Gambill is an opera singer (Heldentenor).
Stephen Hinton is a British-American musicologist at Stanford University. A leading authority on the composer Kurt Weill, he has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history, with contributions to publications such as Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Funkkolleg Musikgeschichte. His most recent book, Weill's Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, the first musicological study of Weill's complete stage works, received the 2013 Kurt Weill Book Prize for outstanding scholarship in music theater since 1900. The reviewer for the Journal of the American Musicological Society described the book as "a landmark in the literature on twentieth-century musical theater."
Johannes Erath is a German opera director.
Michael Boder was a German conductor of opera and concert who worked internationally. He was music director of the Basel Opera from 1989 to 1993, of the Liceu in Barcelona from 2008 to 2012, and principal conductor of the Royal Danish Theatre to 2016. He conducted regularly at the Vienna State Opera, including the world premieres of Cerha's Der Riese vom Steinfeld and Reimann's Medea. He also conducted the premieres of operas by Pascal Dusapin, Hans Werner Henze, Luca Lombardi, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Manfred Trojahn, among others.
Alfred Kirchner is a German actor, theatre director and theatre manager who is based in Berlin. He worked at theatres such as Theater Bremen, Schauspielhaus Bochum, the Burgtheater in Vienna and the Staatliche Schauspielbühnen Berlin, before turning to freelance work. He has staged productions in Europe and North America, including several world premieres of both drama and opera. He directed the premiere of Martin Walser's Ein Kinderspiel in Stuttgart in 1971, the U.S. premiere of Henze's We Come to the River at the Santa Fe Opera in 1984, and the premiere of Hans Zender's Stephen Climax at the Oper Frankfurt in 1986. In 1994, he staged Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival.
Olivier Tambosi is an Austrian opera and operetta director.