EDISON AWARD - in the category "contemporaray music"
'Heiner Goebbels is both composer as well as director. Because of a brilliant way of combining these two talents, he creates with ‘Landschaft mit entfernten Verwanten’ musictheatre, that even though it is making use of a large diversity of musical forms and styles, forms a real unity. We hear the texts of for instance Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Leonardo da Vinci and Henri Michaux sung, spoken, whispered and screamed out, and at the same time the music uses style-quotations of music from the Middel-Ages until Stravinsky, but also jazz, Turkish -and Indian music and other worldmusic-styles. The listener is totally taken away by the human history, a world full of war, in which a lot of personal stories ar told. ‘Landschaft mit entfernten Verwanten’ alarms, reflects and gives comfort, is raw and at the same time unbelievalbly beautiful. This is a live-recording, but the quality of both the performance as well as the recording is so high, that all the objections one could have with a live-recording are totally non-existing in this case. The fact that one can not visibly see this production on stage, is not a lack at all, it rather stimulates ones fantasy!'
