Gisela May singt Erich Kästner (1972) (24/96 Vinyl Rip)

From Wiki:
Gisela May (born May 31, 1924 in Wetzlar, Rhine Province) is a distinguished German character actress of theatre and a singer, critically acclaimed for performing the songs written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. She also appeared as a film and TV actress in a number of movies between 1951 and 1991.
May studied at the drama school in Leipzig. She was employed for nine years at various theatres, including the State Theatre of Schwerin and the State Theatre in Halle. From 1951 she was engaged at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Max Reinhardt's former workplace. She played a variety of roles from the classics to modern.
In 1962, May moved to Bertolt Brecht's theatre group, the Berliner Ensemble, to which she belonged for 30 years. Here she played many roles including Madame Cabet in The Days of the Commune, Mrs Peachum in The Threepenny Opera and Mrs Kopecka in Schweik in the Second World War. The theatrical highlight in Brecht's stage work was her personification of Mother Courage. This performance was for about 13 years until the end of 1992 central to the repertoire of the Berliner Ensemble. Since 1992, the artist has been freelance, often working at Berlin's Renaissance Theatre.
May's second career as a chanteuse ran parallel to her acting. The composer Hanns Eisler valued her particularly for her command of Brecht's style, and worked with her.
In addition to song interpretation, May has experience in musicals: in Hello Dolly, she performed as the title character at the Metropol Theatre in Berlin, and as Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret at the Theater des Westens.
Tours through Europe, across America and Australia have taken her to New York City's Carnegie Hall, to the Sydney Opera House and La Scala, Milan. In 1989, she performed in London at a celebration of the 40th anniversary of establishment of German Democratic Republic (GDR).
May has been internationally acclaimed as First Lady of the Political Song and Best Brecht Interpreter. She has performed all over the world for the past forty years. May was one of the leading artists in the former GDR from the early fifties onward. She enjoyed an intensive collaboration with Hanns Eisler and was attached as an actress to the Berliner Ensemble for thirty years, until she was fired in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.[citation needed] She now performed every two months at the Berliner Ensemble, singing the songs of Brecht, Weill, Eisler and Paul Dessau.
May is the subject of the film, "Every Song Tells a Story" (1998). The film won the Prix Meilleure Vie d'Artiste Festival International du Film d'Art' 1998.

Emil Erich Kästner (23 February 1899 – 29 July 1974) was a German author, poet, screenwriter and satirist, known for his humorous, socially astute poetry and children's literature.
Kästner's years in Berlin from 1927 until the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis in 1933 were his most productive. In just a few years, Kästner became one of the most important intellectual figures in the German capital. He published poems, newspaper columns, articles, and reviews in many of Berlin's important periodicals. Kästner was a regular contributor to different daily newspapers such as the Berliner Tageblatt and the Vossische Zeitung, as well as to the theater journal Die Weltbühne. In Kästner's Complete Works (published in German in 1998), editors Hans Sarkowicz and Franz Josef Görtz list over 350 articles from 1923 to 1933, but the actual number may be much higher. Much was lost when Kästner's flat burnt during a World War II bombing raid in February 1944.
Kästner was a pacifist and wrote for children because of his belief in the regenerating powers of youth. He was opposed to the Nazi regime in Germany that began on 30 January 1933 and was one of the signatories to the Urgent Call for Unity. However, unlike many of his fellow authors critical of the dictatorship, Kästner did not emigrate. Kästner did travel to Meran and to Switzerland just after the Nazis assumed power, and he met with exiled fellow writers there. However, Kästner returned to Berlin, arguing that he could chronicle the times better from there. It is probable that Kästner also wanted to avoid abandoning his mother. His epigram Necessary Answer to Superfluous Questions (Notwendige Antwort auf überflüssige Fragen) in Kurz und Bündig explains Kästner's position:
I'm a German from Dresden in Saxony
My homeland won't let me go
I'm like a tree that, grown in Germany,
Will likely wither there also.
The Gestapo interrogated Kästner several times, and the writers' guild excluded him. The Nazis burnt Kästner's books as "contrary to the German spirit" during the infamous book burnings of May 10, 1933, which was instigated by the then Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Kästner witnessed the event in person. Kästner was denied entry into the new Nazi-controlled national writers' guild, the Reichsschrifttumskammer, because of what officials called the "culturally Bolshevist attitude in his writings predating 1933." This amounted to a gag order for Kästner throughout the Third Reich. Instead, Kästner published apolitical, entertaining novels such as Drei Männer im Schnee (Three Men in the Snow) (1934) in Switzerland. Kästner received an exemption to write the well-regarded screenplay Münchhausen under the pseudonym Berthold Bürger in 1942. Bombs destroyed Kästner's home in Berlin in 1944. In early 1945, Kästner and others faked a filming engagement in the remote Mayrhofen in Tyrol to avoid the Soviet assault on Berlin. Kästner was in Mayrhofen when the war ended. He wrote about this time in a diary that he published in 1961 as Notabene 45.
After the end of World War II Kästner moved to Munich. There, he was the culture editor for the Neue Zeitung newspaper and published a magazine, Pinguin, aimed at children and teenagers. Kästner was also active in literary cabaret; he was involved in productions at the Schaubude (1945–1948) and Die kleine Freiheit (after 1951). Additionally, he worked for different radio networks. During this time, Kästner wrote a number of skits, songs, audio plays, speeches, and essays about National Socialism, World War II, and the stark realities of destroyed post-war Germany. These works include the Marschlied 1945, the Deutsches Ringelspiel. This was followed by the children's book Die Konferenz der Tiere (The Animals' Conference), a Pacifist satire in which the world's animals unite to successfully force humans to disarm and make peace with each other; it was made into an animated film by Curt Linda. He also renewed his collaboration with Edmund Nick whom he had met in Leipzig in 1929 where Nick, then Head of the Music Department at Radio Silesia, wrote the music to Kästner's very successful radio play Leben in dieser Zeit. Nick was now the Musical Director at the Schaubude and set more than 60 of Kästner's songs to music.

Tracks
01. Kopernikanische Charaktere gesucht · 1940 01:19
02. Modernes Märchen · 1928 02:35
03. Ansprache einer Bardame · 1928 04:03
04. Höhere Töchter im Gespräch · 1930 02:10
05. Chor der Girls · 1929 02:03
06. Sachliche Romanze · 1929 01:43
07. Eine Mutter zieht Bilanz · 1929 02:16
08. Das Lied, genannt "Zur selben Stunde" · 1952 03:10
09. Das Leben ohne Zeitverlust · 1946 05:54
10. Klassenzusammenkunft · 1928 02:41
11. Die Dame schreibt der Dame · 1931 02:23
12. Das Lied vom kleinen Mann · 1931 02:37
13. Kennst du das Land, wo die Kanonen blühen · 1928 02:42
14. Fantasie von Übermorgen · 1929 02:06
Total time: 37:34

Musicians
Gisela May: vocals
Studio-Orchester, Leitung Henry Krtschil