Dorfen has reason to celebrate, because 1250 years is a milestone birthday. Certainly there was a lot going on here even before the first written mention. But as much as this summer can hardly be topped. In the small town in the district of Erding, 200 participants recently brought Goethe’s Faust – first and second part in three and a half hours – to an open-air theater stage in the middle of the historic old town.
After the tragedy sold out eight times, the Jakobmayer municipal cultural center is now treating the inclined audience to something to laugh about and sit back and relax: a small but extremely well-attended festival with three large open-air square concerts in the pretty old town setting. Martina Schwarzmann will kick things off on Saturday, July 22, followed by Helge Schneider and that on the weekend Herbert Pixner project.
The grandstand from the Faust spectacle has been left standing for the coming events. The auditorium on the lower market square will be expanded by a few hundred seats to a total of around 1500 seats for the cabaret evenings and the concert. If ten percent of Dorfen’s population came, it would be full. But since not everyone has time, this is also something for people from further away. Dorfen can be reached by train from Munich Ostbahnhof in about 40 minutes, individually motorized from the east and west via the A 94 motorway and from the north and south via the B 15 federal road.
The square concerts program is very carefully put together. Martina Schwarzmann is a terrific cabaret artist. The spectacular thing about her is the unspectacular. Her comedy is that her stories and songs are not almost, but exactly like in real life at home in Altomünster and elsewhere in Bavaria.
The grandstand at the lower market in the middle of the pretty old town of Dorfen.
(Photo: Renate Schmidt)
Helge Schneider has little Bavarian about him. But he’s so unique anyway that you don’t even know exactly which planet he probably comes from. He’s touring with a program promisingly titled The Last Bullfighter – Big LA Show. Someone who has already seen it wrote that, as always, it was a wonderful “mix of jazz and nonsense”. And over the past 20 years, Herbert Pixner, together with his congenial project partners, has created his own, unmistakable style of folk music – that’s no less than musically ingenious.
Jakobmayer Anniversary Festival, Martina Schwarzmann, Saturday, July 22, 8 p.m.; Helge Schneider, Friday, July 28, 8 p.m.; “Herbert Pixner Project”, Saturday, July 29, 8 p.m.; Open Air Unterer Marktplatz in Dorfen, pre-sale ticket Treff Dorfen, telephone 08081/1393 and on www.jakobmayer.de