This April, the Grand Prix Nova launches "The Listening Room" – a series of public auditions in the lead-up to the 14th edition of the festival. The auditions will take place from April 16 to June 11 at the Goethe Pavilion of the Goethe-Institut Bucharest (32 Calea Dorobanți), the event’s partner.

The audience will have the opportunity to listen to five German radio dramas that have won awards in previous editions of Grand Prix Nova (GPN) or in other international competitions. The selection reflects the theme of this year’s edition – focus: Germany. Audience members will receive English subtitles, the official language of the Grand Prix Nova festival. Admission is free, no reservation required.

Audition schedule:

• Thursday, April 16, 7:00 p.m.: „Wildly Tender Is Thy Music – Songs from the Moor” by Merzouga (Eva Poepplein & Janko Hanushevsky), producer: Deutschlandfunk (I Prize GPN 2025), 56 min.

In her “Poems from the Moor”, the poet Emily Brontë (1818-1848) evokes the special atmosphere of her childhood landscape. We get a glimpse of her everyday life in Haworth, a village in the middle of the Yorkshire moors. 200 years later, a sound artist spends a year on an uninhabited bird island and its moors. With his microphones and hydrophones he starts recording that archaic landscape. The duo Merzouga sets Emily's poems to music as “Songs from the Moor” and orchestrates them with a contemporary sound composition of moor-sounds and bio-acoustic field-recordings by the late Tom Lawrence, who extensively recorded and studied stridulating water beetles in the Pollardstown Fen. Moors are often perceived as hostile, spooky places, where bog-bodies and eerie ghosts dwell. That’s why scientists of the Greifswald Moor Centrum, one of the world’s leading facilities in peatland-studies demand: we need new narratives connected to the moors in order to protect them. By interweaving music and science, sound-art and poetry, Merzouga explores the importance of moors in the face of the climate-crisis and attempts to raise interest for this fascinating habitat between water and land.

• Thursday, May 7, 7:00 p.m.: „Faust Song of the Sun” by Werner Fritsch, producer: ARD (I Prize GPN 2013), 49 min.

“Faust Song of the Sun” is a concept for radio, film, theatre, installation and printed book. In German language “faust” means literally “fist”. The main idea of this project is to open up this fist, the German literature Faust material, to five media and five continents. The three hour lasting film poem “FAUST SONG OF THE SUN” appeared on DVD (Filmedition Suhrkamp/ABSOLUTMEDIEN) and was broadcasted until now three times in TV. But in this radio poem I turn the formula around.The Faust of this radio poem, hovering between death and life after a car accident, wants the opposite. As in Goethe’s Faust II, he roams the world, travels to the dramatic landscape of Antiquity, to Australia and to the Orient, talks to Nefertiti, meets an old Hopi Indian woman, and encounters the famous poets of the orient like Omar and Yannus Emre.

• Thursday, May 21, 7:00 p.m.: „The Supervisor”, by Nis-Momme Stockmann, producer: NDR Kultur (Premiul III GPN 2023), 59 min.

Risk controller Dante Meyrowitz is trapped in a hamster wheel of endless Excel spreadsheets, Ritalin, and competitive pressure. As he begins to contemplate suicide, one morning, Tim Würfel appears – a “state-certified” caretaker, part of a government project aimed at combating overload and depression. But the supposed rescue quickly turns into a new form of captivity.

• Friday, June 5, 7:00 p.m.: „Fear of Death” (Episodul 1) by Andreas Jungwirth, directed by Judith Lorentz, producer: MDR (Prix Europa 2025 Selection), 31 min.

Sophie (16) and Moritz (24) are in a sports car on the highway. Moritz suddenly stops in the passing lane for no visible reason. What is he doing? Is he trying to commit suicide? From this scene, we jump back in time and experience from Sophie's point of view how she meets Moritz, the crisis she is in with her best friends Vanessa and Amina and why she is afraid of losing her parents and her apartment. The fact that many things in Sophie's life are crumbling does not go unnoticed – her new neighbor Paul (15) keeps an audio diary for his mother, who is in a coma, and observes Sophie. The storylines of the two become increasingly intertwined: Sophie and Paul carefully find each other, they support each other and ultimately fight together to save their high-rise building.

In 10 episodes, “Fear of Death” tells us about friendships and love, many emotional moments and political dimensions, secrets, violence and fears and about finding one's place in life. Episode 1 sets the tone for the story, opens up the conflicts and introduces the characters.

• Joi, 11 iunie, ora 19:00: „Buzz Suppression. Recording Strictly Off the Record” by Ulrich Bassenge, producer: WDR & SRF (Premiul I GPN 2019), 54 min.

Four musicians are battling themselves and the laws of the market. Years after their first appearance in the radio play "Beer on the Carpet", the band without a name is attempting a comeback: against the centrifugal forces of age, precarious working conditions, and the aesthetics of the mainstream.