SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden, Freiburg Hans Zender - Haas & Widmann: Donaueschinger Musiktage 2006 Vol. 2 (2007)

Georg Friedrich Haas
Georg Friedrich Haas, born in Graz in 1953, studied composition with Gösta Neuwirth, piano with Doris Wolf, and music pedagogy. Since 1989, professorship in counterpoint, composition, and analysis at the Musikhochschule Graz; prizes and stipends from the Salzburg Festival, the Österreichisches Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur, as well as from the City of Vienna.

Jörg Widmann
Jörg Widmann was born in Munich in 1973. He studied clarinet at the Hochschule für Musik München with Gerd Starke later with Charles Neidich at the Juilliard School in New York.
As soloist he has performed with important conductors and orchestras in Germany and abroad. His passion is chamber music, and he performs regularly with partners such as Tabea Zimmermann, Heinz Holliger, András Schiff, Kim Kashkashian and Hélène Grimaud.
At the age of eleven Widmann began studying with Kay Westermann and later continued his studies with Hans Werner Henze, Wilfried Hiller, and Wolfgang Rihm. He has since received many composition prizes, including the Förderpreis of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung and the Ehrenpreis of the Münchner Opernfestspiele, the Kompositionspreis of the SWR Sinfonieorchesters Baden-Baden und Freiburg and the Claudio-Abbado-Kompositionspreis of the Orchesterakademie der Berliner Philharmoniker in 2006.