Two eminent Austrian artists, the writer Alois Hotschnig and the composer Thomas Larcher, present works that arise from the complex interplay of sound and sense. Hotschnig’s prose is acutely attuned to the musicality of everyday speech. His finely calibrated rhythms both enhance and undermine the words’ meaning. Larcher responds to the same creative impulse from the other direction. His compositions are more than settings of poems to music. For Larcher “words function as a magnet, pulling the music into alignment”.  Heute (Today), Larcher's composition for soprano and orchestra based on distillations of Hotschnig’s texts, presents us with a wonderful example of his understanding of sound and sense.