Event

The KlangForum – solo! series spotlights performers from the ranks of KlangForum Heidelberg. On October 26, 2025, at 6:00 p.m., Johannes Mayer, tenor with SCHOLA HEIDELBERG, will present an unconventional recital at BETRIEBSWERK Heidelberg, accompanied by J. Marc Reichow on piano. Ekkehard Windrich will serve as sound director.

It is no coincidence that, in his contribution to the series, tenor Johannes Mayer pushes beyond the boundaries of a traditional classical song recital – for example, toward an outsider opera character by Modest Mussorgsky, into the vaudeville setting of the Five Songs by the Czech avant-garde composer and Nazi victim Erwin Schulhoff, into the "Spätroth" of a Günderrode setting by Wolfgang Rihm, or into the vocal extremes of the "bloody" sacred mysticism of the Russian avant-garde composer Nicolas Obouchov. For the composition "Verbo" by the Mexican composer Eduardo Partida (2019), the singer even reaches for a megaphone...

All the songs, lieder, and chansons explore the figure of the lonely individual adrift in the current – lonely in the flow of time, on the fringes of society, beyond mediocrity and the articulable, and yet electrified by a will to express and a curiosity for sound.

After all, the KlangForum wouldn’t be the KlangForum if it didn’t also allow Johannes Mayer to explore the sonic possibilities of electronic playback: as in "Parlando," a work for voice and live electronics by the Polish vocal artist and composer Agata Zubel (2000), but also in its own version of a conceptual piece created by Karlheinz Stockhausen as early as 1965/66, as if for this concert series: "Solo." "

J. Marc Reichow will also perform the world premiere of a piano piece dedicated to him by Stefan Litwin, whose title alludes to Brecht and Eisler’s “Spruch 1939”:

In these dark times, will people still sing?
Yes, they will sing – of these dark times.

Works by Mussorgsky, Schulhoff, Obukhov, Stockhausen, Zubel, Partida, Rihm, Litwin (world premiere), (Kr-)Eisler

Tenor | Johannes Mayer (SCHOLA HEIDELBERG)
Piano | J. Marc Reichow (ensemble aisthesis)
Sound direction | Ekkehard Windrich