Donaueschinger Klangtage: Das Biergold

In Germany, the central performance culture is run on a stunningly high level, both musically and in terms of organisation. As far as its contemporary music field is concerned, the new music festivals still try to convince the world that Germany has become a normal, western nation, in such a forced way that meanwhile the craziness cultivated there, while new music in the rest of the world is moving-on, gives these festivals the character of time capsules, conserving the abberations of the sixties:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoUXIAZDlRk

In the second fragment, the flow of the river Rhine as depicted in Wagner's Ring, is compared with the flow of beer, in an attempt to make the noises somehow digestible.

However funny and entertaining such presentations may be for the kind of people who apparantly have not outgrown their infancy, the contrast with 'serious classical music' as practiced elsewhere in the country, not only in a musical sense but also in terms of intelligence, is equally stunning.