CCMusic.com

Kurt Schwitters (b. 1887) was an exceptionally gifted reciter and lecturer - although less as someone who forms language than as someone who deforms it. As an artist-clown, the bourgeois Schwitters was capable of giving free rein to his anarchistic and chaotic tendencies. Tearing, bending, covering, overpainting: what Schwitters said about his "Merz painting" can be applied as a deforming and deformulating in the poems published during the same period, among others the "Ursonate". As a performing artist he took the goals of the modern architect, "light, air, and sun," and added another, laughter: "Merz is the smile at the graveside and the seriousness at amusing events." The members of the ensemble Die Schwindlinge (founded in 1985) have, above all, presented programs with Kurt Schwitters and hits of the 1920s to 1940s.