Music on the Brink of War

Music From Yellow Barn: Pierrot Lunaire with Soprano Lucy Shelton and Songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht with Actors Walter Van Dyk and Liza Sadovy

PROGRAM

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op.21
Weill/Brecht (arr.Michael Haslam): O Moon of Alabama: A Kurt Weill Cabaret 

Since its premiere in 1912, Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” has been regarded by generations of musicians and audiences as an icon of artistic originality. Igor Stravinsky, who knew something of originality, referred to Pierrot as the “solar plexus of twentieth century music”. While Schoenberg embraced new techniques to frame his work and stretch the listener’s imagination, even as he turned to the aesthetics of melodrama in Pierrot, Kurt Weill sought to frame the realities of modern society with music that reflects its popular culture.

Both Schoenberg and Kurt Weill (with dramatist Bertolt Brecht), whose Threepenny Opera”, “Mahogany”, and “Happy Days” appear alongside the first stirrings of the Second World War, found the cabaret to be an environment well-suited to work that blurred the lines separating art and popular music, and the socialist and capitalist worlds to which their music reacted.

Lucy Shelton, soprano
Liza Sadovy, actor
Walter Van Dyk, actor
Sooyun Kim, flute
Alan Kay, clarinet
David McCarroll, violin
Jonathan Dormand, cello
Seth Knopp, piano
Oren Fader, guitar
Michael Haslam, keyboard
Caleb Hudson, trumpet
Michael Hosford, trombone
Lizzie Burns, double bass
Eduardo Leandro, percussion

Presented in partnership with SOLUNA: Dallas International Music & Arts Festival.

            

Soundings: New Music at the Nasher is supported by Charles and Jessie Price and Kay and Elliot Cattarulla.
Additional support is provided by Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger.