This audiobook is based on three stories and four short dialogues about growing up. The experience of her characters, Mirjam Wiesemann writes, has much to do with inner and outer music: with music that actually sounds, and with a music of memories, feelings and thoughts that only the characters themselves hear. Both worlds of sound were to become audible here. After “Vom Mädchen das nicht schlafen wollte” and “Die Prinzessin”, it is the third production of the audiobook series Wort&Musik for children and young people.
In “Unter dem Flügel” the father’s piano playing becomes a bedtime ritual, a companion into sleep, dreams and darkness; its sudden loss becomes a burden on the life of the later adult. “Warum spielst Du Kontrabass, Vater?” tells of too much music: the son experiences his father’s tireless double bass playing as a shackle and works himself up into feverish fantasies of destruction. “Frau Schultheiß und die Vogelstimmen”, the longest of the three stories, is set at school; the thoughts of an older pupil wander from the classroom to a visit to the zoo with his mother and to a dictation from his primary school days.
Three musicians have immersed themselves in the stories. Alongside excerpts from the musical literature they play their own compositions and improvisations, recorded here for the first time. For the interludes Bernd Wiesemann plays pieces from his “Widmungen” for toy piano, and for “Unter dem Flügel” inside-piano improvisations in which the strings of the grand are struck with mallets, plucked and bowed. Wlodzimierz Gula, principal double bass of the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, plays excerpts from Sergei Kussewizki’s Double Bass Concerto in F sharp minor Op. 3 and his own improvisations. At the organ of the Kunst-Station St. Peter in Cologne, with recorders and bird-call whistles, Martin Schmeding combines music by Olivier Messiaen, Akira Nishimura, Jacob van Eyck, Hans-Martin Linde and François Couperin with improvisations of his own.
The director was Sylvia Schlunk, who was also responsible for dramaturgy and concept together with Mirjam Wiesemann. Ulrich Tukur recorded “Unter dem Flügel” in August 2009 in Montepiano, Italy; the other spoken-word recordings were made between December 2009 and February 2010 at the Cybele Studios. The toy piano recordings date from 2003, the other music recordings from spring 2010. In February 2011 the magazine hörBücher / BuchMarkt chose it as audiobook of the month. Bastian Trost reads “Warum spielst Du Kontrabass, Vater?”, Sebastian Urzendowsky “Frau Schultheiß und die Vogelstimmen”; the hybrid SACD runs to 56:34 in stereo and 5.0 surround.