“Cursed be love. I forge the avenging ring.” In Richard Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen”, Alberich takes the side of power and thus sets in motion an event that ends the paradisiacal original state and conjures up the twilight of the world. In the radio play adaptation by Regine Ahrem and Peter Avar, Lars Rudolph speaks the dwarf. On the one hand dangerously cackling. Totally whiny because severely frustrated sexually, on the other hand. The Rhine daughters teased and bullied him with their hypocritical advances. The large-scale production of the RBB with the parts “Rheingold”, “Die Walküre”, “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” is available from DAV (1 CD each with a running time between 60 and 80 minutes).
The “Ring” is offered here as a fantasy spectacle that may not fascinate the opera enthusiasts who make the pilgrimage to Bayreuth. There are certainly many who have avoided the stage festival so far. Ahrem and Avar tell the story stringently on the basis of the libretto, relying on an impressive cast of actors: Bernhard Schütz as Wotan, Martina Gedeck as his wife Fricka. Dimitrij Schaad is Siegfried, with Bibiana Beglau as Brünnhilde at his side, and Fabian Hinrichs lending his voice to King Gunther. Everything is held together by Regina Lemnitz as Erda. The earth goddess as omniscient narrator is the calming pole in this radio play “Ring”. Felix Raffel has composed a catchy soundtrack, which takes up Wagner’s leitmotifs and, despite all the drama, is also restrained and gives space to the elegiac.
The real highlight is the recording technique. An artificial head equipped with microphones was used, in front of which the speakers can act as if they were on stage. Assuming you’re wearing headphones, the result is an acoustic 3D effect that makes you feel like you’re in the middle of the action, bathing with the Rhinemaidens and looking over Siegfried’s shoulder while forging swords.
Lena Gorelik gets to the point when she writes in “Landkarte der Emotions” that what the writer Yamen Hussein tells her about his escape from Syria “can’t be well imagined in a café in Munich, everything is too nice as always… Yamen tells, and I say nothing”. Gorelik’s plea for careful listening can serve as a guide on how to deal with all the angry, sad, wounded reports, stories, poems and letters from authors coming from war and crisis zones with whom their German-speaking tandem partners enter into a cross-cultural dialogue. They are collected in the anthology “Next Writing. (W)Change of Place” published by Hörverlag (1 MP3 CD, approx. 9 hours 40 minutes).
All texts were first published on the literature portals “Next Writing” and “Next Writing Switzerland”. Platforms that have existed since 2017 and give back their literary voice to the persecuted and those who have fled. For the audio book, the more than 30 exiles, from Rabab Haidar to Abdullah Alqaseer and Rasha Habbal to Ronan Ahmad, read their texts in their mother tongue. The German translations then found two convincing interpreters in Melika Foroutan and Sabin Tambrea. In a third step, the tandem partners then answered. The Afghan women’s rights activist and poet Mariam Meetra, in whose thoughts the war continues, for example Sylvia Geist, who asks herself: “How can two women with such different experiences get into conversation?”
“Drawings of the patient OT” is the name of an early album by “Einsturzenden Neubauten”. OT, meaning the visual artist and resident of the Gugging Oswald Tschirtner sanatorium and nursing home. So it is obvious that Mark Kanak is the speaker for his one-person radio play “Tollhaus”, published by Belleville-Verlag, in which the 62-year-old patient Niedermoor is in an institution somewhere on “Fischland-Darß-Zingst” for some unknown reason. finds again, resorted to “new buildings” impresario Blixa Geld (1 disc, 55 minutes). If you think of Kafka’s “The Trial” here, you are not wrong.
Somewhere between delusion and reality, Niedermoor tries to reconstruct his life. In between, he quotes the house rules of the oppressive place, clumsy official language mixed with personal madness. In addition, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen has designed a soundscape of electronic rumble, sweet melodies and the sound of the sea. Cash performs as pretentious as usual. The names of the three sections of the Baltic Sea Peninsula have never been heard so pointedly: “Fischlanddd!” “Darsssssss!” “First!”