Inspired - highs and lows

Harkening, listening, windblown, breathed... From the depths of the valley, between water and stone, right up to the mountain summits. In 2010, the Blau/Krebs duo improvised for the first time at Therme Vals, experimenting with surprising, archaic sounds and new, unusual techniques. Extraordinary sound landscapes flooded the rooms and valley, brought to life by the didgeridoo and conch shells, creating windblown miniatures of sounds and silence

René Krebs

It creaks, crunches, gurgles and twangs: what the musician René Krebs experiments with are sounds of very different nature. Originally a trumpeter and jazz musician, Krebs loves using very unusual instruments. He plays the gas flame organ, blows into conch shells or mumbles and gurgles with water trumpets. His unusual instruments earned the musician René Krebs a job at Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

Alejandro Blau

Alejandro Blau performs in ensembles and as a soloist. As a Master of the didgeridoo he communicates a wide spectrum of rhythms and timbres. What particularly fascinates him is the unbelievable range of moods that he can elicit from this instrument.

Priska Walss, Nick Gutersohn and Robert Morgenthaler have been sounding out new directions and forms of expression with alphorn playing in their trio "Zürihorn" for more than a decade. They incorporate their many years of different experiences in African music, classical music, free improvisation and jazz into new pieces that have emerged from playing music together. Their new CD "Wanderlust" came out in 2011.

Priska Walss

Born in Zurich, Priska Walss studied at the Music Conservatory in her home town and was a member of the Graubünden Chamber Philharmonic for more than ten years. Besides this, she has improvised as a trombonist and alphorn soloist and in established ensembles. As part of her diverse rang of jobs, Priska Walss has been significantly inovled in the discovery and establishment of the alphorn in experimental music over the last two decades.

Nick Gutersohn

He grew up in the Zurich Oberland, studied the trombone at Zurich Music Conservatory and the Swiss Jazz School in Bern. Nick Gutersohn is at home with improvised chamber music. He has been constantly working with the same groups for several years and composes and arranges his own usic and other pieces. In addition, he performs as a guest with other groups time and again and tours with performances in Gerany, France, Italy and the USA.

Robert Morgenthaler

Robert Morgenthaler studied at Zurich music Conservatory and the Swiss Jazz School. He has been a lecturer at the Bern University of the Arts HKB and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts since 1979. His international work as a trombonist and composer has taken him on tours in Europe, Africa, the USA, Asia and Russia.

Felix Krull, the son of a bankrupt sparkling wine producer from the Rhine valley is a dreamer, fantasist and upper class good for nothing, who profundly senses the illusory nature of the world and life and aims to style himself into a kind of illusion of life right from the start. He feels that he is favoured and advantaged by nature but he is not according to his class. He corrects this unjust accident using deceit which comes very easy to him with his charm. In love with the world but without being able to serve it in a bourgeoisie way, he strives to make the world fall in love with him. Volker Ranisch traces Thomas Mann's exalted art of language with this solo evening. By slippping into the role of the first person narrator Felix Krull, he brings to life the illustrious society in the novel with its numerous characters by speaking freely in front of his audience and at the same time gives a vivid impression of the aouthr's excellent wit. After its premiere in 2005 at the Theater im Palais Berlin, the production was a permanent fixture of the theatre's repertoire for four years and is now being performed at guest performances among others in Zurich, Freiburg, Dresden, Chemnitz and Brussels with huge success.

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann is considered to be one of the most outstanding representatives of 20th century German literature. His life and work were in constant conflict with his individual artistic existence and a poet's socially commited calling. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his first novel Buddenbrooks (first published in 1901) in 1929. Born in Lübeck, he emigrated during Germany's national socialist reign and was expatriated in 1936. He spent the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he died in 1955 in Kilchberg. The final version of Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954) is one of his last works, which was planned as a parody on Goethe's autobiography Poetry and Truth. Thomas Mann humorously approximates the artist to a conman, thus parodying the classic coming-of-age novel and being in both the tradition of an adventure novel an picaresque novel.

Volkar Ranisch

Was born in 1966 and completed his theatre studies at the "Hans Otto" Drama School in Leipzig between 1986-90. He has been continuously working on different theatre productions, feature films and television films since 1988, including jobs at the Schauspielhaus Leipzig, Deutsches Theater Berlin and Schauspielhaus Zürich. He regularly performed as an ensemble member and guest actor at the Theater im Palais in Berlin for eight years. He has been working independently on texts and compositions for the stage and directing musical theatre and plays since 1999.

Vrenelis Gärtli - An evening for ember day children

"Overwhelmming enjoyment...", raved di Zeit, when Tim Krohn's glacier legend Quatemberkinder appeared in 1998. "Until now you would only have believed you could find such wild stories from the Latin Americans", said the Tagesanzeiger. The long awaited sequel Vrenelis Gärtli appeared in 2007. Vreneli and Melk enchant again this time alpine figures and sorcerers are wandering about, but above all Vreneli invents an unheard of art and plays a game with her beloved, which Melk does not have a clue about. With the double bass player and singer Anna Trauffer, Tim Krohn has developed a strange meditative stage show using the novel, in which the character's story is humbly and freely sung and narrated and always in that idiosyncratic language that is almost a dialect, which makes Tim Krohn's prose so distinctive.
"Now that's what I call art", concluded the Zeit critic in 1998. But that was really just the start...

Until recently, a woman lived just below the summit of the Piz Spiert, who was always just called Stine by everyone, although she was far from being a child anymore. She lived in an alp, which was called  the stony alp as cows had grazed there before. However a few hot summers had made the névé on the western side melt, the melt water had penetrated into the rock, the night frost had burst open the cliffs and the mountain had been mouldering since then. Individual stones and even whole landslides frequently plummeted down and transformed the alp had been too dangerous for the cows for a long time, the heat had also scorched the plants they feed on and therefore only goats were now left on the stony alp. They were hit often enough by stones and yet Stine loved her alp. She managed it together with a farmhand, Severin and her mother, who she called Mumma, and year after year even after the first snow she was reluctant to leave the mountain and move down to her winter quarters."
That's how barren the Grisons mountains can be!
However, you can rely on Anna Trauffer (music) and Tim Krohn (text) to tell the story as playfully, musically and laconically as ever.

Just like when you were a child
Night-time story in your hotel room with Tim Krohn (in German)

Since Tim Krohn first appeared at Hotel Therme ten years ago as a guest author, he has now and again read stories for guests in their room at night. in 2011, he wrote a series of stories for Hotel Therme that are set in the hotel, on the Vals' mountain slopes or in the village of Vals. Select one of them, go to bed, snuggle under the covers and let the author read you to sleep. The stories last ten to twenty minutes, then Tim Krohn turns off the light, wishes you good night and leaves you to your dreams.

Book the readings at reception, either at 10.00, 10.45 or 11.30 pm. Other times are also possible by arrangement. The readings are free.

Tim Krohn
Was born in North Rhine Westphalia in 1965, grew up in the Glarus mountains and lives in Zurich today. His novels "Quatemberkinder" and "Vrenelis Gärtli" are also set in the mountains and enjoy cult status in Switzerland. He made a name for himself in Germany with "Irinas Buch der leichtfertigen Liebe" and "Ans Meer". His story "Der Geist am Berg", which was originally written for Hotel Therme Vals, appeared in 2011. Tim Krohn's works have won several awards, most recently the Cultural Award from the Canton of Glarus.

Anna Trauffer
Was born in 1980. She lives in Zurich and works as a freelance bass player in musical theatre, improvisation and performance. She studied at the Bern University of the Arts and mainly performs as a singing double bass and solo artist. In November 2006 she won the special prize for the best interpretation of the contemporary compulsory piece at the international double bass competition in Bern. Besides jobs in various orchestras, her regular performances also include the SO21 programme on radio LoRa, where there are no restrictions on her love of experimentation with marginal music.

When Haydn was writing his six-piece composure Duette, and the archbishop threatened him the withholding of his earnings due to either not knowing about his illness or out of despotic arbitrariness of the failure to hand it in on time, it turned out that Mozart was in Salzburg right at that time and he wrote the remaining two duets for Haydn. Haydn is said to have kept both works as "sanctuary in their original form" and thereby preserved "Mozart's undying souvenir always". The eight pieces for the violin and cello by Reinhold Glière came into existence in 1909. Glière combined a propagandist direction with popular idioms. His harmony presented itself in an extremely "Russian" manner and his melody based itself on folkloric expressions. The duet for the viiolin and the cello by Alexander Tcherpnin also leads into the melodic world of the Russian landscape and forms an exciting dialogue between the two string instruments, reaching highs and lows, of friction, searching, finding, accopanying, merging and yet remaining themselves in this togetherness of toughts.

Between the water and stone of the Grisons mountain landscape, melodies lead us via Salzburg through Russia and Hungary to linger for shorter or longer in the older and more modern moments of the traditional note sequences of different cultures and to pluck some bright little stars from the nightly composition sky in the meantime.

Daniela Oswald
Was born in Zurich in 1979. She already won various prizes as a youngster at Swiss youth music competitions, including first prize with distinction with her former piano trio. Her passion continued to focus on chamber music during the years she studied at the University of Music Zurich with Thomas Grossenbacher from 1996-2000 and then in Lucerne with Marek Jerie until 2005. Daniela Oswald plays in various orchestras in Switzerland and abroad as a freelancer and is a member of several chamber music groups (Pocket Opera Company, duo with the bassist Jonas Tauber, duo with the pianist Maria Gabrys, Collegium Musicum Basel, Thun Chamber Orchestra, first classics, Aargau Chamber Orchestra, Amadé Chamber Philharonic, and others). She currently plays on a cello made by Caspar Lorenzini, 1758 Piacenza.

Malwina Sosnowski
This young violinist comes from Basel and studied at the renowned Curtis Institute of Music Philadelphia, with Ida Kavafian and Joseph Silverstein, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in 2009. Afterwards she was a student of the Austrian star violinist Benjamin Schmid for 2 years at the Bern University of the Arts. In July 2011, at the age of just 25, she graduated as a soloist with honours and was awarded the "Eduard Tschumi Foundation" prize as the best soloist graduate. She was already invited to play with the Basel Symphony Orchestra on their China tour at the age of 18. Malwina Sosnowski has already performed as a soloist with the Bern Symphony Orchestra and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra as well as on Swiss radio and television. In 2011/2012 she can be seen at the "Menuhin Festival Gstaad" and the Vogler Quartet Chamber Music Festival in Ireland, among others. Malwina Sosnowski masters a large repertoire of famous works for the violin with symphony and chamber orchestra. She is most interested and committed to new discoveries from the romantic, classic and modern periods though. She develops programmes for her own ensembles, which create a new context and at the same time incorporate the established.