Youkali (DEU)The four women who make up Youkalí have worked together since 2015. Their plan has abandoned the standard concert format in favour of a modern music theatre with movement and performance. Their programme at Rudolstadt, Tightrope Walker Without A Net is centred on the words of the German-Jewish poet Mascha Kaléko (1907–1975). Between the wars, in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, she wrote with ‘mind-rescuing irony about everyday life, longing and the madness of the world’. Youkalí’s performance is a musical journey in the lyricism of Mascha Kaléko. By turns, cheerful and melancholic, this is powerful stuff filled with a contagious lust for life, defiant elegance and quiet tenderness.

Photo Julie Schönewolf