Rilke Duino Elegies / Debussy Préludes II

About this event

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies are a profound cycle of ten poems that wrestle with the human condition — our place between the animal and the angel, the ache of love, the fear of death, and the search for meaning. Willy Praml, an experienced Frankfurt theatre maker known for his spare, concentrated handling of classic texts, recites the entire cycle. The performance is not a reading but a full physical delivery, letting the rhythms and images fill the industrial elegance of the old Naxos factory hall. Between the elegies, and sometimes threading through them, pianist Leonhard Dering plays Claude Debussy’s Préludes, Book II. These twelve short pieces are themselves glimpses of worlds: swirling water, crumbling temples, moonlight, firework. Debussy wrote them in the same years Rilke was finishing the Elegies, and both artists were reaching beyond realism into something more fragmented, more sensed. Dering, co-curator of the Naxos Hallenkonzerte series, knows the hall’s acoustic well and treats the piano as a partner to Praml’s voice rather than background. The evening is calm, concentrated, and quietly intense. You sit still and let the two mediums speak to each other. The programme lasts about 90 minutes without an interval. It will suit anyone who already loves these works or who wants to encounter them for the first time in a setting that trusts the audience to listen.