Reimann: A Dream Play / For there is nowhere to remain

"Ein Traumspiel" – Aribert Reimann's first opera – is finally available on this album, in the production by Theater Hof that has been emphatically celebrated by critics and opera audiences alike. As significant as vocal music is in Aribert Reimann’s body of work, the role of literature is equally central for the composer as an impulse and source of inspiration, language material, a surface for friction, and an object of musical adaptation: composing for the voice is, in the broad spectrum of Reimann's work, from unaccompanied solo pieces to opera, almost always a setting of literary texts. The visually powerful "Traumspiel" captivates from the very first note with its melodic variety and intensity. Aribert Reimann succeeds in making the underlying theme of August Strindberg’s play—compassion—sensually tangible, and at the end, gives Indra’s daughter a gift package, tied with masterful music, of human worries, suffering, and complaints to take into the afterlife to God Indra. In addition to August Strindberg, Reimann was also inspired by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, though he treats his first "Duino Elegy" quite differently in musical terms: in his composition "Denn Bleiben ist nirgends" (For Staying is Nowhere), he combines the text, recited by a speaking voice, with a broadly scored symphony orchestra to form a melodrama. Here, the music corresponds to a text which, as Reimann notes in his commentary on the work, "justifies the development of a piece of independent music alongside it, and which is not merely a starting point for musical accompaniment." Featured are Franziska Rabl (mezzo-soprano), Karsten Jesgarz (tenor), James Tolksdorf (baritone), and Marek Reichert (baritone), the Opera Choir of Theater Hof and the Hofer Symphoniker conducted by Walter E. Gugerbauer, as well as the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, conducted by Manuel Nawri, with Martin Engler as the speaker.