Salzburg bull: Three stars of cabaret are awarded

When the Salzburg Stier cabaret prize was awarded for the first time in 1982, a Gallneukirchner could celebrate: Christian Schacherreiter, ex-director of the Peuerbach-Gymnasium in Linz and OÖN literary critic, accepted the prize with Gerald Fratt for Austria.

41 years later, things have come full circle: for the first time, Upper Austria is the venue for the award winners’ gala. Malarina for Austria, Mathias Tretter for Germany and Dominic Deville for Switzerland were honored with the renowned prize at the Posthof in Linz today. They each receive 6,000 euros in prize money. The gala starts at 7.15 p.m., from 7.30 p.m. it will be broadcast live by the organizer Ö1. The OÖN are media partners. Presenter Gery Seidl presents the prizes, and the winners each play 40-minute excerpts from their current programs. Yesterday, Josef Hader and accordionist Otto Lechner got in the mood for the prize in the sold-out Posthof.

The Viennese cabaret artist Marina Lackovic, better known as Malarina, couldn’t believe that she was being awarded, as she told OÖN: “I thought I was booked for a performance.” She was born in Serbia, came to Tyrol in the early 1990s and now lives in Vienna. In her program “Serbs are dying slowly” she conducts “historical-political satirical reappraisal of the tension” between Austria and Serbia, as she describes it herself.

Mathias Tretter from Würzburg wrote his first cabaret texts as a civil servant and student, and with his colleagues from the “First German Compulsory Ensemble” he was part of the young savages in cabaret at the time. He is now “one of the established forces on German-speaking stages and one of the most prominent satirists of the digital age,” according to the jury’s statement.

Dominic Deville is nationally known in Switzerland thanks to his late-night show “Deville Late Night”. The trained kindergarten teacher also inspires his audience on the cabaret stages, for example with the “Children’s Fright” program. “The charmingly outrageous cabaret artist has become the indispensable voice of Swiss political satire,” says the jury about the 47-year-old.

• The award winners gala will be broadcast live on Ö1 from 7.30 p.m. today. Tickets are available at posthof.at.