Pianist Richie Beirach, who among other things wrote parts of the film music for »Fabian und Der Gang für die Hunde«, will join violinist Gregor Hübner in a journey into his musical cosmos. It is also a birthday concert for the pianist's 75th birthday.

There will be more than a bit of linguist acrobatics this November when Gunter Baby Sommer and Matthias Creutziger invite the legendary Austrian jazz musician, composer and bandleader Dieter Glawischnig to the Semper Zwei stage. From the 1960s, Glawischnig was a close friend of Ernst Jandl (1925-2000), that master of experimental lyricism and concrete poetry; moreover, the two men performed countless programmes together featuring the spoken word and music. Jandl’s innovative use of language, his unexpected placing of words and syllables, the deliberate and pleasurable destruction of the normal, fascinated the musician and offer many parallels to jazz. »Ernst Jandl, a self-confessed jazz fan and connoisseur, already introduced a kind of ‘beat’ to his poems in their regular rhythmic patterns; his sound poems are vocal solos – moving into the realm of music through the exploration of rhythm and sound.« Like a third instrument, the lively texts full of sly wordplay – here read by Wanja Mues – are intermingled with piano and cello sounds (performed by Dieter Glawischnig and Stephan Braun, respectively), promising the audience an evening packed full of musical and linguistic surprises.

Richard Strauss and jazz? If anyone can forge a musical connection here, it’s Günter Baby Sommer, whose preoccupation with Dmitri Shostakovich has already confirmed his ability to add and create interesting, new musical takes on the so-called »classical« repertoire. And that’s a lot more than just »Loud & Quiet«: it’s the feeling of how music also breathes and invokes hugely diverse yearnings for harmony and sound. Günter Baby Sommer and his jamming fellow musicians approach the music of Richard Strauss with contemporary forms of improvisation that spring from the breeding ground of jazz music.