Klaus Höring honored as “Actor of the Year 2023”.
Vienna (OTS) – ATTENTION: REMEMBER BLOCKING PERIOD FOR ALL MEDIA (TV, RADIO, INTERNET, TELETEXT AND PRINT) UNTIL FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2024, 9:30 P.M.!
In the audience vote conducted by ORF for the 31st time, Ö1 listeners chose the winner from 22 new radio play productions in 2023. The “Audience Prize” went to “The Funeral” by Marc Carnal. “Blasse Hours/Blijedi sati” by Manuela Tomic was awarded the “Best Original Radio Play” award given by literary and cultural critics. The results of the audience and jury decisions were announced at the “Ö1 Radio Play Gala” on Friday, February 23rd at the ORF RadioKulturhaus. Klaus Höring was honored as “Actor of the Year”. The “Best Sound Design” award went to the new interpretation of the radio play “Shared Childhood” by Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker. The winning projects from “Track 5’”, the Ö1 short radio play competition organized in cooperation with the “schule für speise” (school for poetry), were also honored.
The award-winning radio plays will be broadcast again in the “Ö1 Hörspiel” (Saturdays, 2 p.m.): the “Best Original Radio Play” “Blasse Hours/Blijedi sati” by Manuela Tomic on February 24th, the “Audience Prize”-winning piece “Das Begräbnis” by Marc Carnal on March 2nd. The winning projects from “Track 5’” can be heard on March 9th, “Gemeinsame Childhood” on March 23rd.
“Ö1 Audience Award” for Marc Carnal’s “The Funeral”
Marc Carnal won the “Ö1 Audience Prize” in 2022 with his radio play “The Wedding”. This year, Ö1 listeners voted the sequel “The Funeral” as their most popular radio play. Just like its predecessor, “The Funeral” is written in couplets throughout – and thrives on the raw, satirical description of human abysses. The place of action is the funeral service of the late magnate Walter List. Family and companions gather in an idyllic provincial cemetery to pay their last respects to the recently deceased. But controversy is inevitable: the millionaire is said to have recently changed his will and disinherited his two children. As if that wasn’t enough, a wine-loving priest and the stoned grandchildren finally turn the funeral into a fiasco. Christoph Grissemann once again acts as narrator. Michaela Bilgeri, Reinhold G. Moritz, Sarah Viktoria Frick and Martin Vischer can be heard in other roles.
The Ö1 listeners awarded second place to “Harmonie. A case for Dattinger and Kastner”, a crime grotesque by the FM4 presenter duo Hannes Shower and Roland Gratzer. The protagonists Dattinger and Kastner are an unlikely duo and rather an involuntary team – working together as a “tandem” put together by the police psychologist is their last chance to avoid being fired. For their first case together, the two investigators go undercover as nurses at the “Harmonie” retirement home. An absurdly comical tour de farce with a prominent cast: The ensemble includes, among others, Maya Unger as a police psychologist, Johannes Silberschneider as a major, Inge Maux as a sprightly nursing home resident and singer Voodoo Jürgens as a civil servant.
Third place went to “Greatest Hits” written by Florian Grünmandl. The radio play is a live production that was recorded in front of an audience in 2023 under the direction of Martin Sailer at the ORF Studio Tirol. The two protagonists, pop singer Gustavo and his background singer Lalala, have already left their most successful years behind them. In the radio play, the two look back on their life together as a love and music couple. Lalala, in particular, takes credit for her role alongside Gustavo. It’s a story about madness, lies, fan culture and – of course – love. Harald Windisch and Jasmin Mairhofer can be heard as Gustavo and Lalala.
Manuela Tomic’s “Balle Hours/Blijedi sati” was named “Best Original Radio Play”.
Since 2007, the “Best Original Radio Play” prize has also been awarded as part of the “Ö1 Radio Play Gala”. This year, the jury made up of literary and cultural critics from the “Salzburger Nachrichten”, the “Presse”, the “Kleine Zeitung”, the “Falter” and the “Standard” awarded “Blasse Hours/Blijedi sati” by Manuela Tomic in the Directed by Andreas Jungwirth. In “Pale Hours”, the protagonist Mira, voiced by actress Marie-Luise Stockinger, has to return to Bosnia, her “foreign” homeland, for the funeral of her grandfather Ivo. It is an autobiographical story by the author Manuela Tomic. She was born in Sarajevo in 1988 and had to flee the Bosnian War with her family as a child. The basis for the radio play was her column in the weekly newspaper “Die Furche”, in which she wrote about her family history with black humor. Together with director Andreas Jungwirth, she created a bilingual radio play version in German and Serbo-Croatian. The hour-long car ride to her grandfather’s funeral becomes a reflection on a life that only knows two chapters: before the war and after the war. While trying to understand what happened to her and her family, Mira encounters a collective feeling of fear, overwhelmed and speechless.
“Track 5’” – the winning pieces of the Ö1 competition for short radio plays
“I’m listening for the first time” was the motto of this year’s Ö1 short radio play competition “Track 5’”, which Ö1 once again organized with the “schule für speise”. From the 201 submissions that met the criteria, a jury nominated ten short radio plays:
The required criteria were a maximum length of five minutes, an original sound and the sentence “I’m hearing this for the first time”. First place and therefore 1,000 euros in prize money went to Stefan Pointner with “Heast”. Second place with 500 euros went to “The Electric Men’s Rider” by Anna Maria Pahlke. Third place, also with 500 euros, went to the radio play “Listen. Fugue in A Minor(ity)” by Artur and Robert Irmler. In addition, the “School for Poetry” awarded a special prize for the tenth time, worth 1,000 euros, which Paul Schlager received for his short radio piece “The Kestrel”.
Award for “Best Sound Design” to “Together Childhood”
This year the prize for the “Best Sound Design” of a radio play was awarded for the second time. “Childhood Together” by Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker impressed the expert jury and took first place. More than 50 years after the original production, which was recorded on Westdeutscher Rundfunk in 1970, Dorothee Hartinger, Philipp Hauß and Tobias Leibetseder have reinterpreted the strongly autobiographical work. The dialogue between the two protagonists represents a game, a remembering and invention rich in associations. Jandl and Mayröcker’s autobiographical references emerge clearly, and their own memories are enriched with those of the other. The jury justified its decision as follows: “Here, an entire team enjoyed the rhythmic guidelines of the text and added a lot to them – acting, sound design and direction intuitively perfectly balance language and music like children on a seesaw. The anti-naturalistic sound design is choral, spherical and of some technical sophistication. It doesn’t overshadow anything, it doesn’t push itself into the foreground. But it lets us fly. The excellent rhythmic design of the actors contributes significantly to the extremely successful sound experience. Congratulations to Tobias Leibetseder for music and sound design, Elmar Peinelt and Manuel Radinger for sound design as well as to Dorothee Hartinger and Philipp Hauß in all roles, ASB Maienzeit for vocals and Alexandra Wimmer for assistant director!”
An honorable mention was given for the sound design of the radio play “Paula” by Brita Kettner. “Here, the entire team succeeded in designing varied rooms whose acoustic doors are connected to each other, open and close effortlessly, and thus clearly structure the radio play and keep it varied throughout. The jury’s unanimous verdict: absolutely worth listening to! We congratulate Anna Kuncio and Manuel Radinger for the sound design, Peter Kaizar for the music and direction!”
Klaus Höring is “Actor of the Year 2023”
Since 1997, an expert jury has chosen the radio play actress or actor of the year. This time the choice fell on Klaus Höring for his outstanding achievements in more than 50 ORF radio play productions, including Daniel Wisser’s radio plays “Die Vitaminlüge” (2022) and “Wartezimmer” (2023), in the play “Sladek” by Ödön von Horváth ( 2001), in “What do you see? The Night!” by Ludwig Fels (2022), in “Come, Sweet Death” (2002) by Wolf Haas or in Helmut Peschina’s “Antigone. A poem” (2020) directed by Elisabeth Weilenmann. “Working with Klaus Höring is a great blessing. His characters are straightforward, direct and unpretentious, and still young even in old age. His voice comes through the microphone immediately and naturally. He is a linguistic aesthete and vocal acrobat who loves and is loved by the microphone. It is as if you were secretly listening to a person who was simply being who they were, completely unobserved,” said the jury. Those honored by the expert jury so far include Brigitte Karner, Bibiana Zeller, Peter Simonischek, Elisabeth Orth, Cornelius Obonya, Gerti Drassl, Petra Morzé, Markus Meyer, Karl Markovics, Vera Borek, Johannes Silberschneider and Regina Fritsch.
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Isabella Henke
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