Since their first collaboration on the Glocke project, GrauSchumacher Piano Duo and Klaus Maria Brandauer can already look back on several successful performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream. More performances have been planned of this trully fantastic programme, in which language and music correspond so closely. Klaus Maria Brandauer adapted Shakespeare's comedy to Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's incidental music. During the course of the play he slips naturally into several roles and astonishes the audience with his ludicrous versatility. Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher are just as virtuoso: the duo develops a musical suggestion in their play that creates an illusion of Shakespeare's colourful panorama full of lightness and love of life. On their next project together, Klaus Maria Brandauer will be reading selected letters by Mozart while GrauSchumacher Piano Duo will be playing selected works by the composer.

Reviews on A Midsummer Night's Dream

BADISCHE NEUESTE NACHRICHTEN, 24/3/2010 --- The ambitious project: throughout reading the play Brandauer slips into all roles of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream while GrauSchumacher Piano Duo accompanies, accentuates and contrasts four-handedly the irrepressible voice and expressiveness of the speaker, with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's musical realization of the theme. (...) All this is played with wonderful plasticity and foresight that could also be admired in Brandauer. (...) One would have liked to listen to him and the congenial piano duo even longer.

GREVENBROICHER ZEITUNG, Helga Bittner, 27/6/2007 --- The internationally acclaimed actor has turned the well-loved comedy into a musical play for the audience. The music of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy here stands on equal footing with the play (...), congenially interpreted by the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo. An impressive crossover-presentation of words and music that allows each to flow into the other, neither overpowering, each maintaining their value.

NWZ, 31/7/2006 --- Klaus Maria Brandauer on his best comedic form, and the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo with perfect piano mastery. (...) First in the Overture, which Mendelssohn composed at the age of just 17, and then in the Scherzo with its famous elf-music (shimmering runs of several octaves) which follows, the duo displayed its qualities: the most exact interplay, and contrasted executions with the finest complexion of sound. Particularly in the Nocturne and in the famous Wedding March, moreover, clearly and dynamically formulated interpretations appeared, conveying the romantic impetus of the orchestral edition to the piano as if to do this were self-evident.