Krenek’s wonderful travelogue is a real tour de force; a fusion of the remembrance of things past—the Schubertian landscape of Austria and its cultural history—with the music of the 1920s. The very special demands it makes of its performers are effortlessly negotiated by Florian Boesch and Roger Vignoles.
The dubbing spokesman Christian Brückner (among others for Robert De Niro) and Michael Wollny prove to be the perfect couple to let Heinrich Heine sound again. With aesthetic flair and imagination, Michael picks up the mood and gesture of the poems and prepares the musical breeding ground for Brückner's haunting performance of the texts in mostly completely free improvisations. Voice and piano intertwine and inspire each other in the dialogue of recitation and real-time composition.