New Cosmos Society - a heart for music!

An initiative by Eugenia Dushina and Peter Ritzen to create the greatest art of art; the music, to celebrate and to bring it closer to the people with modern high-tech means.

A heart for music pays homage to the great era of music, namely the XIX. Century, but also with a view to diversity and intercultural relationships, including with the Far East, especially CHINA.

Peter Ritzen , our internationally recognized Flemish

Pianist, composer and conductor,

President of the Society of New Cosmos Friends in Vienna,

has long been behind the wheel to combine our great European musical traditions with the vast cosmos of Chinese culture.

Since May 2021 he has been appointed artistic director of the National Performing Arts Group in Chongqing, a metropolis in China. He is also music director of the Chongqing Philharmonic Festival Orchestra and composer in residence in the People's Republic of China.

Eugenia Dushina is a Viennese soprano.

A celebrated star in the opera sky!

Born in Moscow.

Studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and at MDW in Vienna.

Winner of numerous competitions, including the Grand Prix Maria Callas.

With none other than the internationally recognized and well-known Peter Ritzen at the piano.

Peter Ritzen

wrote his piano quintet in 2006 in Taipei (Taiwan Province).

The piece has already been performed several times; including at the international Salzburg Palace Concerts under the direction of Luz Leskowitz, and in Belgium through the Moscow Chamber Academy, which the work also recorded for the NAXOS CD label.

Today we hear the first movement from Peter Ritzen's piano quintet.

The piano quintet is played today by the newly founded

New Cosmos string quartet , conducted by the violinist Jovana Raljic, well-known in Vienna.

Eugenia Dushina and Peter Ritzen bring a very unusual repertoire of songs!

1. Two songs by Theodor Leschetizky op. 32

- Don't ask why? Based on a poem by Friedrich Halm (1806-1871)

- Waldvögelein (based on an old German poem)

* Theodor Leschetizky (1830.1915) was a great figure in the world of music in the second half of the 19th century. Century.

Leschetizky, like Peter Ritzen, was a cosmopolitan.

He stayed in Russia, where in 1861 he founded the Imperial Conservatory of St. Petersburg together with his friend, the Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein. Leschetizky spent much of his time in the imperial city of Bad Ischl, especially at a later age.

He was a welcome guest.

In addition to descendants of Theodor Leschetizky, who still lives in Bad Ischl, an international Leschetizky World Congress took place in Bad Ischl in 2019. The city of Ischl is also the cradle of the Leschetizky Association Austria, whose chairman Peter Ritzen has been since the Leschetizky World Congress (of which he was director).

2. Richard Strauss (1864-1849) from Four Last Songs

- September

- In the Sunset

based on poems by Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) and Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), written in 1948 in Switzerland, where Strauss and his wife had moved after the end of the war.

Their title does not come from the composer, nor were they intended to be a complete cycle.

Rather, they document a continuous, dynamic examination of the subjects of death and parting, also against the background of the past war and in anticipation of one's own imminent death.

In the last of the four songs, Im Abendrot , Strauss not only quotes his own orchestral piece Death and Transfiguration, but also, rhythmically slightly modified, the beginning of the German Requiem by Johannes Brahms.

Ilse Pauls, poet reads poems from her own work

- Christmas peace

- One will come

- In those December days

- Radiant Jesus child

Born in Vienna in 1941. First poems at the age of 15. After a long break, she made a new beginning with religious poetry.

Book publications: 1993 “The Inner Lake”, 1996 “Late Harvest”, 1997 “Voices from Austria”, 2001 “Silent Hours”, 2005 “On the Way”, 2007 “Gifted Hours”.

Readings at home and abroad, translations and settings of numerous poems.

Last year Eugenia Dushina and Peter Ritzen performed two songs by PAULS LIEDER, based on poems by Ilse Pauls and set to music by Peter Ritzen

Wesendonck songs by Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

With Eugenia Dushina and Peter Ritzen

- The angel

- In the greenhouse

- Dreams

The Wesendonck-Lieder are a cycle of songs by Richard Wagner, based on poems by Mathilde Wesendonck. The five poems for female voice and piano were written in 1857 and 1858.

In Richard Wagner's opinion, every artist is entitled to a muse. From 1852 onwards he found one in his Swiss exile in Zurich in Mathilde Wesendonck, whose husband Otto Wesendonck, a wealthy silk merchant, supported him financially and ideally. However, the relationship between the two stood in the way of Mathilde's husband on the one hand and Wagner's wife at the time, Minna, on the other, so that a real love affair could not develop. The relationship lasted until it suddenly ended, when Minna intercepted a letter from Wagner to Mathilde and provoked a break, above all in an unfulfilled longing for one another.

This situation is reflected in Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. Around this time he set Mathilde's five poems to music. Wagner explicitly described two songs from this cycle as studies on Tristan and Isolde ("Im Treibhaus" and "Träume").

Peter Ritzen's Chinese Folk Songs Transcriptions

And for dessert there is again a very interesting reference to China, which the organizer Gesellschaft der New Cosmos Freunde in Vienna emphasizes again and again. A short excerpt from Peter Ritzen's transcriptions for Chinese folk songs: A girl who loves to sing!

On this special occasion, Peter Ritzen is handing over the piano to his former student Anton Xu , who is currently studying at the Haydn Conservatory in Eisenstadt!

The program that you are listening to could be realized thanks to the generous support of the General Delegation of the Government of Flanders and the piano gallery, which is very popular in Vienna and which, in cooperation with the Musik Quartier Ehrbar Saal, provides the infrastructure and the beautiful Bechstein concert grand.