Description
With Friedrich Hölderlin's 'Turmgedichte', the Vienna-based actor and voice artist Christian Reiner joins Bruno Ganz - who has read poetry by T S Eliot, Georgio Seferis and also Hölderlin - as one of the few artists to perform the spoken word on ECM.
In his last decades German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) lived in a tower in Tübingen under the care of a carpenter and his daughter. During this confinement Hölderlin wrote unusually open and easy poems. These so-called 'Turmgedichte' (Tower Poems) cover approximately 50 works - many of those signed with "Buarotti" or "Scardanelli". Reiner devotes himself here to 25 of these pieces, spoken (in German) in a careful but still very expressive way. Along with German writer Wolf Wondratschek, Manfred Eicher produced the record in January 2012.
Christian Reiner, whose work is often considered to be between speech and music, was born in Munich in 1970. He studied vocals, phonetics and language, and has worked with, amongst many others, the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra, Michael Moore, Hanns Zischler and the English improvising dancer Julyen Hamilton.
Personnel: Christian Reiner (spoken word)