Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Reiner

Land der Arbeit gathers poems and prose by Pier Paolo Pasolini, read in German by Christian Reiner. It appeared in November 2022, the year of the hundredth anniversary of Pasolini's birth. The Italian poet, essayist and filmmaker was an unsparing chronicler of his time. These texts denounce the social ills of his country, while his Catholic faith and the question of poetry run through them. It is Reiner's third spoken-word album for ECM New Series made with the writer Wolf Wondratschek and producer Manfred Eicher.

Reiner and Wondratschek chose the texts together, and Wondratschek produced the album with Eicher and wrote the accompanying essay. In it he asks "how close one can come to the meaning of the poems". Recording took place in Vienna in 2021 and 2022, at Garnison7 and the Innenhofstudios, with Martin Siewert and René Kornfeld as engineers. The German translations come from Sabine and Toni Kienlechner, Maja Pflug and, for Patmos, Theresia Prammer. The cover drawing is by Lilo Rinkens.

The title poem, ten minutes long, closes Pasolini's collection The Ashes of Gramsci. It moves from the landscape of the Terra di Lavoro in southern Italy to the peasants who work it. Brief an Jewtuschenko is his 1963 letter to the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whom he had asked to play Christ in The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Bitte an meine Mutter addresses the mother who played the aged Mary in the same film. At the centre stands Patmos, almost 25 minutes long, Pasolini's 1969 response to the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, which names its victims. A short wordless interlude of birdsong takes its title from the 1966 film Große Vögel, kleine Vögel (Uccellacci e uccellini). Wondratschek's own poem Am Quai von Siracusa closes the disc.

ECM describes Reiner's reading as plain and unpretentious, following the rhythm of the syllables and letting pauses connect the lines. Reviewing the album for ECM Reviews in 2025, Tyran Grillo noted that the recording strips the voice of reverberant space, so that it seems to hang in the air. He also heard Reiner move from a brighter tone in An den Fürsten to sombre attention in Patmos. Of the first album in the series, Turmgedichte (ECM 2285, 2012), with poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, Wolfgang Schreiber wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: "Langsam, fast zeremoniell, doch ohne Pathos". Joseph Brodsky – Elegy to John Donne (ECM 2513) came between the two.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2768, released on 18 November 2022, with Wondratschek's essay in German in the booklet.