Right now thousands of people all over the world are fleeing from war, violence and poverty. Vinko Globokar’s newest work is focused on this very topic: emigration. On February 20, 2015 Exil 3 was premiered in Munich by Peter Eötvös, award-winning actor Bruno Ganz and other soloists.

Dai Fujikura’s first opera Solaris, co-commissioned by Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Opéra de Lille, Opéra de Lausanne, Ircam-Centre Pompidou and Ensemble Intercontemporain, will have its world premiere in Paris on March 5th. The production is directed by Saburo Teshigawara who also wrote the libretto after Stanisław Lem’s famous novel. The multimedia production includes dance, live electronic and videos in 3D. Find out more in our interview.

On March 12 Fabio Luisi will lead the Cleveland Orchestra in a performance of Luca Francesconi’s Cobalt, Scarlet - Two Colours of Dawn for large orchestra. Composed in 2000, the piece has since then been performed by 18 different orchestras in Europe, Asia and in the US, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Luigi Dallapiccola was born in 1904 in Pisino d’Istria, at the time a small town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and defined by the composer himself as “a crossroads between three frontiers. While studying he deepened his knowledge of composers like Ravel, Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky and Hindemith. In 1924, a performance of Pierrot lunaire conducted by Schoenberg himself in Florence left a deep impression on the young musician. In the years following World War II Dallapiccola’s fame began to spread both in Europe and the United States, where he held advanced courses at Tanglewood, attended by amongst others Luciano Berio, and in New York.

For the second time Dai Fujikura receives the Otaka Prize, an award founded by the NHK Symphony Orchestra. The prize is awarded annually to a Japanese composer for an outstanding orchestral work. Past winners include Toshio Hosokawa, Maki Ishii and Toru Takemitsu.

Sergei Rachmaninoff composed the symphonic poem The Rock in 1893. The piece is based on two different literary sources: the poem of the same name by the Russian romantic poet Michail Lermontov (1814-1841) and Anton Chekhov’s short story On the Road.

On February 23, the Teatro Sociale in Como will host the world premiere of the Expo Opera Milo, Maya e il giro del mondo (Milo and Maya around the world), a contemporary opera for young audiences (ages 6 to 14) written by Matteo Franceschini on a libretto by Lisa Capaccioli.

On our blog, our contemporary composers present their favorite work from our catalogs. This time Reinhard Febel introduces Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.

Younghi Pagh-Paan is the winner of the European Church Music prize 2015. The award is founded by the German city of Schwäbisch Gmünd.

Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, Prokofiev, Glazunov and many more – few people know that Ricordi Berlin owns one of the most important repertoires of Russian music: the Forberg catalogue. Click here to see 10 highlights and to download the catalogue.