la Times

All the Salzburg M22 productions were outrageous. "Over the top!" Intended, of course, to be fresh and challenging as theater, while maintaining the highest musical standards. Many of them failed, to my eyes/ears anyway, at one goal or the other, and several failed at both. I believe American audiences had more objections to them than European, and I know why: many European opera lovers, with far more opportunities to attend productions, would have seen and heard more conventional stagings. They would have a stock of memories of the action, the scene, etc. For them, this staging of "La Finta Gardiniera" and even more so the stagings of the later Mozart masterpieces would have seemed a fresh variation on the familiar, an extension of the possibilities of the opera… By Giordano Bruno

A genuine, pleasurable meeting of minds between 17th-century French lute pieces and 21st-century jazz. A gentle music stamped with midnight brooding. (Source: The Times, UK)

Fortune's ways are often unpredictable. Two musicians with seemingly completely different focus. One of them a German jazz saxophonist, blue note saturated by countless gigs in subterranean joints since the 1960’s. The other a lute player from a completely different scene, specialist for ancient music from the middle ages on. Brought together by the visual arts – both of them often performed at gallery openings for a number of Heidelberg artists. One day they were asked to play together, as the relevant exhibition connected the old and the new. An unexpected and consequential prod: It resulted in a lasting collaboration. Now saxophonist Knut Rössler and lutenist Johannes Vogt are releasing their ACT-debut: Between the Times is the name of the CD and the ensemble itself, which is manoeuvred through time and style by the two masterminds and their collaborators percussionist Mani Neumeier and stellar bass player Miroslav Vitous.

A child does not stand the idea of having a new brother and dreams about drinking milk from the breasts of his mother again. The child asks the moon to bring him a tit only for him.

Caroline Boissier-Butini’s 6th concerto for piano and flûte obligée, which she herself entitled La Suisse, was inspired by folksongs; the sources do not allow us to date the concerto precisely, but we can assume that it was composed before 1818. A return to folk melodies was entirely in keeping with the times; Beethoven, for example, used such themes, as did Carl Maria von Weber, who was born in the same year as Boissier-Butini. Her innovation, however, is to quote the “ranz des vaches”, the musical themes that would have awakened in her contemporaries an archetypal sense of Switzerland.