Founded in 1946, the SWR Vokalensemble (Stuttgart Radio Choir) is a leading interpreter of 20th- and 21st-century choral music. In recent decades, it has premiered more than 250 new choral works, including compositions by Maurizio Kagel, Heinz Holliger, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Wolfgang Rihm, among others. In 2006, it recorded three large-scale choral compositions by György Kurtág (Omaggio à Luigi Nono; 8 Choruses on Poems by Dezső Tandori; Songs of Despair and Sorrow) with its then principal conductor, Marcus Creed. The current director, Yuval Weinberg, is equally committed to contemporary choral music, and the SWR Vokalensemble is perhaps the only choir in the world currently capable of performing one of the key works in Kurtág's oeuvre, Songs of Despair and Sorrow. Musicologist Márta Papp wrote about the piece: “In it and through it, it is not a lonely person who shares his feelings and visions with the listener, as in the great vocal series of the past, but a multitude of singing voices, a real crowd that speaks, shouts, whispers and, above all, sings magically to the listener: sometimes making intimate, mysterious communications with each other, sometimes storming through a single word or fragment of a sentence with the many, often 16–18 voices of the two choirs.”

For the full festival programme and ticket purchases, visit: 100.kurtag.hu