They have been working together again and again for more than 20 years and have constantly explored the boundaries of their instructions and not infrequently even expanded them: singer Jutta Glaser and guitarist Claus Boesser-Ferrari. Their current project "Return & Crossing" is a tribute to the Lebanese-American painter, film artist and poet Etel Adnan. An artist of multiple talents, Adnan has exhibited at documenta (13) in 2012 and elsewhere, but has also received several prestigious literary awards. "Her poetry is a kind of sound language for me. It's actually music," Boesser-Ferrari finds. "But you wouldn't do it justice with the usual song structures. And that was exactly our challenge."

So Jutta Glaser and Claus Boesser-Ferrari have opened their music wide to Adnan's poems. In doing so, they have not simply deconstructed their compositions, but, on the contrary, restructured them in a way that floats in the flow of the language, that is, in a peculiarly fluid way. They have deliberately worked in a more sound-painting manner in order to take up the aspect of multiple talents or Etel Adnan's interdisciplinary approach and mirror it in a corresponding art form. "We have been," explains guitarist Boesser-Ferrari, "basically improvising composition. The CD recordings are like a kind of essence in this, but in concerts they always develop in new and different ways, artistically and atmospherically." Just as Adnan's poetry is always read in a new and different way, so is this music, which is so changeable in itself.

Jutta Glaser's singing is a sometimes tender and fragile, sometimes highly expressive, but always respectfully bow to Adnan's texts. Glaser transfers them as virtuously as sensitively into congenial improvisations and alienations, without overstretching the natural richness of the texts' relationships. "Adnan's poetry is, after all, first of all a very high and pure art. To come into contact with it as a singer and to take the freedom to experiment and allow irritation at times, in other words, to work in a way that is both counterpoint and appreciative at the same time, was a very exciting experience."

Claus Boesser-Ferrari, supported by cleverly used electronics, functions here not as an accompanist, but as a second voice in a dialogue of different artistic means and formal languages. The guitarist moves in his usual stylistically confident manner between lyrical sound surfaces, percussive pointing and expressive outbursts.

"Return & Crossing" is a multi-layered dramaturgical production, which not only elaborates the high musicality of Adnan's language, organized in diffuse-open spaces, with love and meticulousness, but also makes it sound as multi-layered as it is rousing.

These recordings thus preserve not least the legacy of the great artist Etel Adnan, who died in Paris in 2021 at the age of 96. For these 12 new pieces are not simply songs, but contributions to the understanding of art.