was accompanied on piano by his wife pianist tom. today's guest on arts and culture. and with welcome to the program twilight people is the new album by andrea saul and tom petty in a collection of songs arranged for countertenor and piano a very introspective atmospheric listening experience a let's learn just a little bit more. counter-tenor voice is haunting. elegant piano work on the couple's new album twilight people. seamus.

in 1005. 2 decades later by the. latest collaboration explores the space between folklore and modern classical. and it's an enormous pleasure to have time. here with me in the studio welcome thank you for coming in twilight your newest album a labor of love i'm assuming obviously between the 2 here and it's it's interesting because it's such a very diverse body of songs. from greensleeves to the 20th century composers that you've brought on there john cage. but you've brought it together in such

a highly personal narrative can you tell us what is the red thread for you there well. what's at the base of this album is our shared passion for folk songs because i believe we both speak for both of us we really like the simplicity of the folk song and the way that it tells a story through the music and. we have been playing folk songs for as long as we've been playing together always putting them as part of our. classical concert programs and in the past it's always been my very simple basic harmonic accompany meant to the melody to the existing melody which is the folk melody and when we thought to put an album together to record it i felt embarrassed to put my own arrangements they're not so interesting so i set up to look for existing arrangements of great composers and this way i found the arrangements from benjamin

britten and vaal williams and aaron copeland and what was interesting for me is to weave them together in a way that shows the similarities rather than the differences and we also added 2 new songs by young composers and these songs also have elements of the same elements of melancholy and snow in the city and dissonance as well now we'll get to those songs in just a 2nd i want to come to you andrea because of the counter-tenor obviously you're specialized in early music in baroque period music this was really new to rain for you how challenging was that. i have a great love for these english folk songs some of them featured on the album and many more of these songs i studied them with my singing teacher when i studied in basel i know many different types of arrangements by joan baez and i mean everybody who sings folk music needs to arrange these songs by themselves and my singing teacher said the art is to make it not sound like an art and that's

the challenge with these songs that you as a classic music singer you present them in the most direct and honest way without resorting to classic music money or is what is it do you think i mean the countertenor community is relatively small it's growing as as as you told me but for instance the cost plateau back in fighting at least they've used to be the real rock stars what is it about the countertenor just briefly voice that you think is so captivating. little i believe it's an instant confusion when you hear a count to 10 and you have never heard a man sing that high before because in society these days the rolled sub pretty clearly aside men speak and talk lower than women do so a man singing high. crosses this barrier and confuses the audience and then the brain tries to make sense of it but you cannot make much sense over it so you just need to listen to the music you've bookended this album very interestingly with

these young composers are a frankel at the beginning and you said that i actually think his piece the rest was a highlight of making this album for you let's see if we can just if we can pull that music in and have a have a listen to it. and for our 1st piece. the fact that it has the same kind of simplicity as the folk songs have. and then it talks but it also has the melancholy in the year ending that you often find in folk songs on the other hand it relates to. more recent history so it's based on a text by play more levy and i think describes the feeling of somebody who was

exported from their home country to their concentration camps and. what i like very much is the fact the fact that i find israeli living in boston who i am is really living in germany and the other young composer on the album is joseph cao address he's from egypt living in london really a virtue also on the oats which and we can possibly pull some of that in because that is the last piece of the other book and let's see if we can listen to joseph talk about. straining and. under way as this is this idea of of building bridges between. diverse cultures and religions is certainly a big in your work and what is your experience with all of these collaboration of the many collaboration that you've done of how music. can be a unifying force i think for musicians it's so hard to understand that the rest of

the world can get along really well but there's so many conflicts because i traveled in the last 30 years i've traveled all over the world from asia australia south america all over europe united states canada everywhere and i meet musicians all over the world and we speak a common language so being on stage with musicians from different different cultures different countries is something soul easy for us and it's so self explaining that the moment we walk on stage all our differences don't matter and we just there's harmony music exists through harmony so if there's no harmony in between the musicians on stage there can be harmony in the music they they want to communicate and that's the sensational thing for me is that for me it's a daily thing and i've experienced that so many times and i wish that the audience can experience the same through our music well i'm sure they will twilight people

will be on tour with the album in the coming months tomorrow i pity him and thank you so much for bringing us this music and for coming into the studio here today and all of us for the holidays thank you. all from me if ariel world of the soul to the very precise and composed worlds of cancun not the photographer from frankfurt creates miniature scenarios that almost always take some kind of a jab at our societal conventions making the tragic scene comical and absurd somehow optimistic. a street that leads to an abyss. an ordinary cafe. houses that could be in any german suburb nothing special but what's this the new neighbor overshadows the older buildings.

something's not right here in these buildings actually exist the answer is yes in fun cool nuts imagination the photographer builds miniature sets creating self-contained worlds that he then photographs. as much as i use in my view that's all i try to show the entire spectrum of life in my works from tragedy to comedy and and i'm able to do that by making the world smaller and representing it in the form of architectural models. could not create his still lifes with great attention to detail uninhabited sets use humor to take a socially critical stance like these creations ironic comments on the realities of modern life. the photographer tries to make everything look as realistic as possible and his ideas don't come from his imagination alone it is a careful observer and he finds inspiration even in a highway bridge

a common theme in his work is living space and his wife had to move away from his native city of frankfurt for lack of affordable housing his models often look at where and how people live. for instance this tiny home one and a half square metres stuffed with everything you'd need to live nothing's missing yet it's all useless likes taking minimalist urban living concepts and exaggerating them creating something new. surge and impossible it's his way of expressing criticism. got it in balance every single year in a heavily populated cities like frankfurt you get very little living space for a lot of money. that's what i'm addressing with this model and the resulting photograph in. the model builder and photographer take several weeks

sometimes months to create one photo tries to get every detail perfect the planters are plastic caps. the doorman's are cut out of sand paper. he uses an analog large format camera to give his photos just the right look for fun building models and taking photos complement each other. is fine with him one day boyle i'm building the model i keep looking through the camera to see if it works the way i wanted to because i started out by the interesting thing is that when i do that at a certain point the model starts looking real to me as though it were out there on the street somewhere that never fails to fascinate me in the. fun cool small worlds are available as postcards in galleries and exhibitions or collected in

a book. the pictures depict the mundane but with some surprising twists a playful mixture of the realistic and the absurd with an astonishing attention to detail. i'll be sure to visit our website if you'd like to learn more that's all we have time for today though so until we meet again all the best from here in berlin and now off does a. eco

africa. for your garden there not many construction materials. for to. use the garbage like old bottles to build. this is the school now all the old homes are here. a simple solution for a serious problem. the code for go in 30 minutes w. . look at me affectionately as affectionately as you can. push it in the middle of this election campaign to turn the camera back on. in the year 2000 a documentary secretly chronicled a power grab. but a mere flabbier of it to the ends justify the means to tunes witnesses 75 minutes on w. oh. in

the life of climate change. the city. people. want to india's do they have their future. d.w. dot com traffic american cities for the multimedia. click temperature. how to cover more than just one reality. where i come from we have a transatlantic way of looking at things that's because my father is from germany my mother is from the united states of america and so i realized fairly early that it makes sense to explain different realities. and now here at the heart of the

european union in brussels we have 28 different realities and so i think people are really looking for a new journalist they can trust for them to make sense of. why this is not often i work at the w. this is news and these are our top stories russia's security service the f.s.b. says it has neutralized a gunman who opened fire on a its headquarters in central moscow one f.s.b. employee was killed and several people were reported one dead in the attack the motive is not yet.