Hymns to the Night

Texts and music on darkness
Nocturnal lyric and prose

From Novalis and Heine through Strindberg to Kaleko in dialogue with Bach's Goldberg Variations and piano improvisations.

The romantic dream world of Heine and Novalis, the urban poetry of Mascha Kaleko, Strindberg's paranoia, Kafka's insomnia, Beckett's surreal monologues, Freud's dream interpretation - they paint a picture of night as a space for fantasies, nightmares, longings, shelter or vulnerability, as a counterworld to daily routine, as a projection of fear, happiness, death and love, and as a symbol of all our dark sides.

Bach's Goldberg Variations, composed some three hundred years ago as an epochal commissioned work for entertainment during nocturnal sleeplessness - enter into close dialogue with the texts, sometimes as a musical twin, sometimes in contradiction, sometimes in mutual interpenetration, sometimes in improvisational transformation.

Markus Becker ranks among the most versatile pianists of his generation. He studied with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling and received important impulses from Alfred Brendel. As a soloist and chamber musician, he collaborates with renowned orchestras and artists; his recordings of Reger's works have been widely awarded. He is a professor at the Hannover University of Music.

Devid Striesow was an ensemble member at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus and regularly performs at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus. He currently appears in "Oedipus" and the antiquity cycle "Anthropolis"; in autumn its continuation "Foreign Sun" follows. He became known through films such as "The Lives of Others", "Yella" and "The Counterfeiters". In addition to theatre, film and television, he is a sought-after reader for literary readings and audiobooks.