For the last ten years, Anne-May has worked in the context of the inspiring combination of voice and harp. Two concert programs have emerged from this work: Lieder von zu Hause und unterwegs (Songs from Home and Far Away) with folk songs from Italy, Russia, Germany, England, Wales, etc. by composers like Benjamin Britten, Maurice Ravel, Luciano Berio, Modest Mussorgsky, Johannes Brahms and others. The program L'énigme éternelle features sacred songs and hymns by Henry Purcell, César Franck, Maurice Ravel and Georg Philipp Telemann as well as Mike Svoboda's Da steht geschrieben, written for Anne-May Krüger (voice) and Beate Anton (harp).

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While still a teenager, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) wrote the monumental poem Die Bücher der Zeiten, a work related to the Books of Revelation in which mankind's deeds are dramatically enumerated. This work tells of the horrors and wonders of the human race, of the salvation through the spirit, of mankind's achievements and their many rewards. In his composition, Mike Svoboda (*1960) assigns the proclamation of this apocalyptic vision to three female voices, thereby creating a link to mythological figures such as the norns, the visionaries of past, present and future. The composer not only conveys the text's semantic content, but also interprets it on a associative and sounding level. Trombone and percussion contribute to the archaic aspect of both poem and composition.

Recording of the world premiere at Musica Sacra Festival Maastricht/NL (Dutch Radio)

Peter Maxwell Davies's almost hour-long monodrama The Medium is a tour-de-force not only for the singer, but also for the audience. Starting out, as it seems, as a seance, the performance becomes more and more ambiguous. Is the medium an impostor or a madwoman? And whose story does she tell? The Medium is, apart from being a most intelligently plotted composition, a glance into the human abyss.

Stage director/stage setting: Marcelo Cardoso Gama

The premiere took place in October 2010 at Landestheater Tübingen.

"Anne-May Krüger demonstrated all facets of her art and stunned the audience until the very last minute. Marcelo Cardoso Gama‘s staging does without all superfluous theatrical effects and creates madness through verismo. Krüger is acting on a platform no bigger than a conductor‘s stand and still creates enough space within herself to let madness take over little by little, pulling the spectators into her imagined world."

Andreas Kolb, Neue Musikzeitung online, 19.10.2010

You can download the exposé with a description of the concept and further details (pdf).

«Not ill, but nervous»

In his extensive oeuvre, British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (*1934) has dealt with the phenomenon of madness in several of his works. In his famous «Eight Songs for a Mad King» (1969) as well as in «Miss Donnithorne's Maggot» (1974), both classics of the experimental music theater, as well as «The Medium» (1981) he meticulously and elaborately examines the relationship between the individual person and society. 

After their work on «The Medium», mezzo-soprano Anne-May Krüger (Miss Donnithorne) and stage director Marcelo Cardoso Gama as well as Carl Rosman (King George III) presented the Medium's predecessors in a new staging at Gare du Nord Basel/Switzerland in March 2014. This new realisation was also part of a research project on the performance practice of New Music at the Hochschule für Musik Basel. The ensemble zone expérimentale played under the musical direction of Mike Svoboda. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was present for the final week of rehearsals.

The virtuosic interaction of voice, performance and multi-media is a core interest of both the singer Anne-May Krüger and the composer and performer Andreas Eduardo Frank, forming Duo frKRr. It’s not the idea of  „more is more“ that triggers this interest, but rather the creation of a playful vexation in the combination of live performance and diverse media levels. This also regards the undermining of role conventions, resulting in the conversion of the vocalist into a part of a virtual machine, or making light and video the accompanist  of the singer. And sometimes the composer also takes the stage as a performer, laying open the technical machinery.

The first collaboration of the Duo, Restore Factory Defaults (2017) for voice, electronic, light and video, has had performances at European festivals like ZeitRäume Basel and Wien Modern and at NUNC! (Northwestern University of Illinois). In 2021, their first evening-length debut program as a duo, what you see – is what you get – is what you hear, was shown in Basel, comprising compositions by Luc Ferrari, Andreas Eduardo Frank and Paul Clift (world premiere). 2023 their new program Music for Unicorns was premiered, featuring world premieres of Mike Svoboda and Chloé Bieri.