Willi Landl and Michael Hornek

Willi Landl and Michael Hornek - A duo that touches with ease and captivates with depth. They transform voice and piano into a play of humor, poetry, and musical elegance. When Willi Landl takes the stage, a singer and songwriter steps forward who is much more than that; he is a chansonnier of our times, endowed with wit, style, and that effortless grandeur that cannot be learned. Together with Michael Hornek, a pianist of impressive range, who plays with Klaus Doldinger's Passport as well as with Maria Bill and Thomas Gansch, he ventures into a territory that is rarely explored today: voice and piano, nothing else.

Yet in this reduction lies a magic that is nourished by self-irony, fine poetry, and a healthy dose of stubbornness. Cheese hedgehogs are longed for, linguistic images tip into the anarchic, and yet that school which has already shaped Georg Kreisler flashes through time and again. The "Rachelied for General Use" provides the most beautiful proof of this.

It is said that no musician becomes a better person than when he accompanies a voice. And indeed, the powerfully assertive yet highly sensitive Michael Hornek knows how to grant Landl's eloquent, often wonderfully quirky Austro-chanson the sonic expansiveness in which his stories can breathe. Light, playful, but always with depth, a duo program emerges here far from any conventional jazz-pop-chanson pigeonhole, a program that embraces rather than draws boundaries.

An evening that shows how much poetry can arise when two extraordinary artists re-measure the world with just voice and piano.