Three spectacular new instrumental pieces meet in Graz. Bernhard Gander’s piano concerto Scorching Scherzo for Joonas Ahonen makes Chopin’s sound world and the pianist’s fingers red-hot with heated-up motor skills. The flute concerto by Clemens Gadenstätter looks inside sound. The intimacy of the finest sonic nuances represents an entanglement with the world. The soloist is Karl- Heinz Schütz of the Vienna Philharmonic.

In her new work, Clara Iannotta creates musical spaces inspired by the poem My heart lives in my chest by Dorothy Molloy. Australian composer Liza Lim’s Sappho/ Bioluminescence is a kind of extended neural network that binds together the erotic trance of Sappho’s poetry, animals and plants that glow in the dark, and the memory banks of the orchestra to create hallucinatory images in sound.

The ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor Marin Alsop lend their musical flexibility to this special concert.