February news

 

Photos c Antonio Maria Storch

With joy, we look back on the premieres that marked the beginning of 2025:

ALLES LICHT (music album release) and NICHTS IST, SAGT DER WEISE (radio play).

There was the excitingly beautiful release concert of the new album ALLES LICHT with Daniel Stickan, organ, in the Neue Kirche Kleinmachnow. A magical evening. Thank you to everyone who made the journey to this place.

„Alles Licht is, in every sense, a magical, sonically powerful album. The combination of piano and organ gives the album a sensitive, nuanced quality, and despite its clever complexity, it radiates an unexpected lightness that is undeniably relaxing.“  

Thomas Semmler, HighResMac

And there was the premiere of my latest highly acclaimed radio play on Mascha Kaléko.

On the 50th anniversary of Mascha Kaléko’s death:
NICHTS IST, SAGT DER WEISE
Radio play by Ulrike Haage about political events and personal strokes of fate in the poet’s life. With poems, reports and letters from Kaléko’s estate.

For the first time since her emigration to the USA in 1938, the poet Mascha Kaléko returns to Germany in 1956 for a lecture tour. She was warmly received. The author of the “Lyrisches Stenogrammheft” and her bold verses are fondly remembered. The Academy of Arts in Berlin (West) would love to award her the Fontane Prize, but when Kaléko learns that the former SS-Standartenführer Holthusen is on the jury, she refuses: “I don’t want to receive anything from this hand, either as an author or as a Jew.”

Embedded in a musical composition with grand piano, harmonium, celesta and vocals, poems, reports, letters and lesser-known notes from her estate tell of her confrontation with post-war Germany, her view of New York Jewry, her move to Israel, where she never quite felt at home, her fascination with Zen Buddhism and Jewish mysticism, but also of the difficult loss of her son – he died of cancer at the age of 31 – and that of her husband. She will never get over either.

“For me, my radio plays are musically illuminated lands of thought, through which I want to show extraordinary text material, clever imaginative thoughts by female artists, whom I also make allies of my own artistic world.” Ulrike Haage

A radio play with texts by Mascha Kaléko

With Winnie Böwe, Toni Jessen, Judith Rosmair and Bernhard Schütz
Singing: Winnie Brückner

Manuscript, direction and music: Ulrike Haage

Production: RBB 2024