‘Going all the way back to the Celts and the Druids, the term nemeton designates a place where forces and energies are crystallised, generally clearings where solemn or ritual actions were performed. The best-known nemeton is certainly Stonehenge. The architectural marvel of Chartres Cathedral is built on a nemeton. In composing this piece for solo percussion, I wanted to depict a “place” of this kind by means of sound. I’m utterly fascinated by the instrumentarium of this work, consisting chiefly of metal, wood and skin instruments that don’t have their own “specific” resonance.

The German-French composer Mark Andre (b.1964) is one of the most important representatives of New Music. His twelve "Miniatures" for string quartet were composed in 2014/17 as a commission from the Arditti Quartet, Bavarian Radio's "musica viva", the Festival d'Automne à Paris and the ProQuartet-CEMC, funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Andre created his organ work "Himmelfahrt" (Ascension), funded by the Siemens Music Foundation, in 2018 on behalf of the Evangelical Church in Germany. The orchestral work woher…wohin was written between 2015 and 2017 as a composition commission by BR's "musica viva" in conjunction with the Happy New Ears prize for composition from the Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation. The live recordings of all three works are now being released in the CD edition of Bavarian Radio's "musica viva" concert series on BR-KLASSIK.