The story of Livre pour quatuor begins in 1948. Originally planned as a six movement work, Pierre Boulez never finished the fourth movement. The composer wrestled with the quartet, creating various drafts – a process which took a long time. At the same time he was also working on other pieces and had no time to prepare the string quartet to be typeset, let alone get it ready for performance. In 1955 movements Ia, Ib and II were premiered in Donaueschingen by the Marschner Quartet. On the composer’s 60^th birthday in 1985 the Arditti Quartet performed all the published movements together for the first time. The completion of Livre is a project that Irvine Arditti has been pursuing for years, and now reaches a successful conclusion with the help of Philippe Manoury and Jean-Louis Leleu. Here, Philippe Manoury explains his work as a musical reconstructor, a story that includes significant challenges, a good deal of detective work, and a stolen suitcase....

An outstanding soloist, chamber musician, pedagogue, artistic director and essayist – and in all these things a musical bridge-builder and partner to musicians, composers and artists alike from various fields: Anssi Karttunen forges his own path. His journey started in Finland at a very special time. “I was born into a lucky generation,” he explains. “This was a time when the windows to the world were more open than before and perhaps even more so than later on. There were many like-minded people my own age who were interested in being more than just one thing; the cellist, the pianist or the conductor. We saw that being a musician can mean many things.” This lucky generation includes Anssi Karttunen’s contemporaries Esa-Pekka Salonen, Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho, with whom he started his voyage of discovery....

Having just appeared at the Ultraschall Festival in Berlin performing brand new music - Georg Friedrich Haas’ Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra - Mike Svoboda is a musical innovator and artistic partner to many composers. Now, the American-born trombonist, based in Europe for many years, has taken a look into his musical past for VAN Magazine. His playlist collects recordings by his musical heroes from his formative years – from the jazz albums that defined his idea of the perfect trombone sound, through late romantic orchestral repertoire, up to the equally extraordinary avant-gardists Ornette Coleman and Pierre Boulez, as well as the pioneer of just intonation, Harry Partch....

Two years after its celebrated premiere, Toshio Hosokawa’s opera Stilles Meer is being revived at the Hamburg State Opera from 31 January, in the original production by Japanese director Oriza Hirata and the musical direction once again taken by Kent Nagano. The work was enthusiastically received by critics and audiences alike; NMZ magazine commented that “Hosakawa’s sounds are so finely tuned, they generate a real undertow,” whilst BR-Klassik praised “a tremendously subtle, tentative drama […] an intense interaction with moments of tension.” Stilles Meer deals with traditional subject matter from Noh theatre, brought up to date in the context of Fukushima. Toshio Hosokawa gave an interview about the opera and its relationship to the Fukushima catastrophe during a visit to Berlin at the end of 2015....

Jan Caeyers and his orchestra, Le Concert Olympique, will make their Berlin debut on 20 November at the end of a tour that has included appearances at the deSingel in Antwerp and the Wiener Konzerthaus. Together with a trio of high-quality soloists – Till Fellner, Antje Weithaas and Maximilian Hornung, who will perform the Triple Concerto – they will present a special programme to kick off their concert series The Beethoven Experience. The title is no empty promise; these concerts will offer a unique insight into the composer’s musical universe, as Jan Caeyers explains in a video interview....