On the second evening of the tenth Hirschberg Song Festival, under the title ‘Between Night and Light’, the programme featured songs almost all of which were composed after the Second World War: works by Aribert Reimann, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, Wolfgang Rihm, as well as by Haosi Howard Chen, who studied under Wolfgang Rihm and Markus Hechtle. The well-attended evening was organised by students from Alexander Fleischer’s song class; Fleischer is also the founder and artistic director of the Hirschberg Song Festival.
The reviewer from the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung praised the conscientiousness with which the young talents approached this music: “Not only did they master the melodic lines – which are difficult to sing because they are immensely complex and demand every vocal skill – with confidence, but they also consistently achieved renditions of great atmospheric depth, making it easy for the audience to open themselves up to the emotional worlds of these unfamiliar sounds.”