Paul Sacher Stiftung

This concert series was part of a complex of events held in spring 1996 to celebrate the Foundation's tenth anniversary. It was put on by a large number of Basel concert agencies, each of which devoted one or two concerts from its own series to this topic. Rounding off the program were three chamber concerts under the Foundation's own direction. The main focus fell on works written between 1920 and 1950 that combined a modern musical idiom with «classicizing» tendencies by resorting to pre-1800 formal models, compositional devices, and instrumentation and by drawing on the ideals of concision, clarity, and intelligibility. These tendencies can be detected not only in such pre-eminent neo-classical figures as Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and the members of Les Six, but in composers from a very wide range of musical traditions, including Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Luigi Dallapiccola. Attention was also given to works that belong to the pre-history of neo-classicism or that demonstrate its impact down to the present day.

Accompanying book: «Classicist modernism. analytical introductions, essays, source texts, edited by Felix Meyer, 483 pp.