Dear Listener,

With this CD we invite you to lend an ear to the varied dialogues that so greatly enrich our lives. We engage not only with other people, but also with the ideas of previous generations and their creative achievements. Each epoch speaks its own language. As an ensemble we experience musical dialogue as an essential form of artistic expression; in our rehearsals, it would be impossible to come together without an exchange of points and counterpoints.

It is a privilege to engage in living dialogue with the composer of a work. We are truly delighted that two contemporary Munich-based composers, Wilfried Hiller and Wolfram Buchenberg, have written pieces for our duo, which we are now presenting on our debut CD.

The death 2000 years ago of Ovid, the poet of the "Metamorphoses", served as the occasion for Wilfried Hiller to write a cycle of eighteen violin duos for us. The pieces not only initiate a dialogue with many different generations of writers and poets (from Hans-Christian Andersen to Rainer Maria Rilke to Michael Krüger), but we as musicians and actor Stefan Hunstein as the narrator also interact with each other, offering points and counterpoints in a dialogue between music and language.

Wolfram Buchenberg's "Saitentänze" are a tribute to our love of nature. The musical depictions of dancing elves, fairies, and "wild women" have thrilled our audiences during many a "forest concert" of the Duo ASAP.

Duo ASAP