The Roaring Twenties — Berlin, Paris, New York
Date/Time
Location
Mahaiwe (14 Castle Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230)
Close Encounters With Music ushers in the winter with mezzo-soprano Heather Johnson, tenor William Ferguson and Ieva Jokubaviciute on piano in The Roaring Twenties — Berlin, Paris, New York, with artistic director Yehuda Hanani on cello
In a performance that evokes cabaret and the 1920s — Art Deco, Prohibition, the loosening of social restraints, Jazz, the Charleston and flappers — “Roaring Twenties” offers a panorama of composers and styles that defined and shaped the era: Samuel Barber, Kurt Weill, Alexander Zemlinsky, Hanns Eisler, Cole Porter, Poulenc, Schoenberg, and Erwin Schulhoff.
Close Encounters gives a bi-continental glimpse into a decade that still looms colorful, mythical and seductive, and soon to be banned in the thirties by the Third Reich. Their brilliant, razor-sharp, wicked and enduring songs (“Bilbao,” “Speak Low,” “Makin’ Whoopee”) are part of the program of Entartete (degenerate) music, composers who careers and lives were interrupted and irrevocably altered by the rise of National Socialism. Close Encounters offers a tribute to the decade of artistic dynamism in theater, film, art and music almost unparalleled in cultural history.