Epochal world premieres, such as the Eroica in 1804 in the Lobkowitz Palace in Vienna or Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps in Paris in 1913, are history.

Today they are pulled out of the organizer oven like hot cakes and have a short expiry date.

A world premiere is now just a seasonal ticket for the composer, who can use it to grab a bit of attention in the limited new music market.

The Stuttgart Eclat Festival, a hotspot in the German avant-garde scene, also announced more than thirty world premieres by 46 composers this year.

The marathon of twenty-one events in six days forced selection, and so every concertgoer or online participant could put together their own festival.

The program was colorful and varied, ranging from scenic experiments to political commitments to challenging orchestral pieces.

Of course, the global megatrend, the climate problem, and other topics affecting the cultural scene such as gender, animal welfare and Covid were also discussed.

The music occasionally became a minor matter, as in the event with the promising title "Electrical Jungles": Two women talked for an hour about forms of violence against women and children, in between there were two short sonorous interludes, some with gestures of suffering Quotations were read from slips of paper - musically a zero display.

Rejection of politically correct collectivism

No comparison with the Ukrainian singer Viktoriia Vitrenko, who accompanied herself on the piano and appeared in "Limbo", a scenic performance, as a bandaged, wounded individual.

In five short song cycles - four of which she commissioned - she countered the depressing present, which was shaped by Corona loneliness, fear of war and the strengthening of dictatorships, with a quiet but steadfast yes to life.

The performance was dedicated to the civil rights activist Maria Kolesnikova, who was sentenced to eleven years in prison in Belarus, and got under the skin.

There were also notable works performed in the traditional mode, such as Steven Kazuo Takasugi's “Piano Exercise”;

through the fusion of technically generated and live sounds, he created a hybrid magical world that the trio Pony Says brilliantly realized.

No mere resonator of organizers' wishes

The SWR Symphony Orchestra, this time conducted by Gregor Mayrhofer, set standards as always.

With Volker Heyn's awkward "Ferro Canto" it finally got its due, a piece that had been canceled twice in 1989 and 1991 in Donaueschingen because it was unplayable.

Chinese Ying Wang demonstrated that excess abundance can be an expression of joy.

And with "Different" for quarter-tone marimba and orchestra, the Jordanian Saed Haddad, who now lives in Western Europe, created a carefully constructed, powerfully eloquent work between cultures, in which more is hidden beneath the surface than is revealed on first hearing.

Haddad cunningly commented on the title of the work, quoting Debussy: "It's not always good to howl with the wolves."