Press commentaries

“[…] while Klich’s piece (with texts by Kathrin Franke) with two ensembles at a long table and a soloist positioned in between gains a highly tense scenic situation from everyday gestures. This is mainly due to the sound design of the prepared concert guitar (Jürgen Ruck), which at times sounds like brittle glass rods and is staged as a dominating event by a space-consuming sound direction.”

Hans-Jürgen Linke | Frankfurter Rundschau

“For Plan-P – An Archaeology of Silence by Tobias Klich, black tables were arranged in the centre of the hall to form a long table and covered with white tablecloth. Porcelain was dished up from a clattering tea trolley that drove in. Members of the Ensemble Modern sat down at the table with their instruments. Violinist Jagdish Mistry put salt in his coffee cup. Finally, guitarist Jürgen Ruck took a seat in the middle of the coffee table: a symbol of the guitar player as a despiser of the bourgeois. A capo placed in the middle of the fretboard divided the strings into two different sounding halves and made it possible to play beyond familiar tonal systems. The texts whispered in the round table were by Kathrin Franke and dealt with a medication psychiatry that only silences instead of curing causes – another social utopian theme. Here, indeed, the attempt to fan the concern of music in the scene seemed to have succeeded.”

Elisabeth Risch | Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“The sonorities of classical instruments, rich in scraping and scratching noises, combine with whispered texts from the margins of society.”

Frankfurter Neue Presse

“Madness has always run through art. In Romanticism, it leaves particularly broad traces – in the biographies of Hölderlin and Nietzsche, van Gogh, Schumann and Wolf and many others. It is only in the course of the 20th century, however, that madness is also used productively by art. Madness is now a fund of knowledge that is able to look beyond the normative. Seen in this light, it is not unusual when Tobias Klich takes us into psychiatry in PLAN P: An Archaeology of Silence. What is unusual is that he seeks out the healthy there, of all people, the therapists, doctors and nurses. With them he finds a language that can hardly articulate itself, he finds stagnations, half sentences, swallowed words and silence. The healthy people are not strong, they are helpless and stunned, they take refuge in empty phrases, evade and deny. Klich’s scenic chamber music transports us to a place where comprehension is but a collection of fragments. Distorted sound recordings of interviews and documentary texts assault us from all sides, barely moving sounds mingle with barely comprehensible speech, the soloistic guitar is fragmented into heterogeneous sections. It, which could offer unity and support, is itself torn apart and devoid of a reliable identity.”

Raoul Mörchen