Anyone who expects sensitively breathy verses at a poetry reading will be amazed here.

The veil of fussiness is torn away without hesitation when the actor Christian Redl rocks out the first ballad with a rough action voice.

It is about a mocking noblewoman who, during a spectacle at the royal court, throws her glove into the middle of a kennel full of "grey cats" - lions, tigers, leopards.

The lady challenges the knight Delorges: "If your love is as hot / as you swear to me every hour / - then pick up my glove."

To the cheers of the spectators, Delorges performs the life-threatening act.

It is true that the coquettish Kunigunde now announces the promised reward of love with languid looks.

But the knight, for his part, no longer wants to hear anything from a woman who enjoys such tests of courage: "And he throws the glove in her face: / 'Thanks, lady, I do not desire!'" When Redl growls at this verse, it sounds like a door is about to slam shut forever.

Love as currency for social reputation and heroism - not with Knight Delorges.

A performance for three

Schiller's “Glove” and almost forty other ballads and poems – that was the program that Redl recorded live last summer at Hamburg's St. Pauli Theater together with Ulrich Tukur and the Ukrainian-born pianist Olena Kushpler.

Ballads tell hearty stories from real life, stories of murder, passion and other catastrophes.

The liveliness increases when the poems are performed in threes, with Kushpler's piano playing as a barometer of moods.

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's "Feet in the Fire" begins with a turbulent start.

A courier for the king of France is wandering through the stormy night.

The thunder rolls, the piano thunders.

Tukur screams as if he has to recite against wind force eleven.

He, the courier, saves himself at the gate of a country estate.

There he is let in by the lord of the castle, even if his hospitality sounds sullen in Redl's mouth: "Your dress, what do I care?

/ Come in and warm up!” Suddenly the music stops.

And the memory comes to the courier, frozen in horror.

He's in a castle he's been to years ago, hunting down the Huguenots.

As a henchman, he tortured his now ill-tempered host's wife to death, roasting her feet in the fireplace.

The opportunity for revenge seems to have come.

But the poem takes an ethically superior course.

Unlike the banquet song oriented towards curiosity and crime, the ballad not only wants to entertain through scenic exaggeration, but also bend the boulevard-like subjects into exemplary ones.

"But her face, I really never know."

This collection of poetry cannot do without a good dose of love pain.

Redl, who as an actor has played many abysmal characters such as the "Hammermörder", celebrates in a tone of pain the complaint about infidelity in Eichendorff's "In a cool reason", where the death wish is only directed against the lyrical ego itself: "I would like to would rather die / then it would suddenly be quiet.” The sober tone of the New Objectivity follows the morbid melt of Romanticism seamlessly: “When they knew each other for eight years / and you can say they knew each other GOOD,” emphasizes Ulrich Tukur – “there they suddenly lost their love / like other people have a cane or a hat.” Apart from this worn-out “'n”, Tukur reads Erich Kästner's “Sachliche Romanze” without the sloppy snap of the 1920s.

But pale.

amazed.

Hesitating: "and didn't know how to go on".

The bewilderment spoken of in the last verse determines this interpretation.

This is followed by the mysterious melancholy of Erik Satie's Gnossienne No. 3, dreamlike piano music that continues the harmony of pathos and laconicism mediated by Tukur.