This weekend, the Cincinnati Enquirer‘s Jackie Demaline provided an early look at CCM’s yearlong Kurt Weill Festival. You can read her preview here.
The festival resumes next month with a Mainstage production of Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes and Elmer Rice’s great American opera Street Scene, conducted by Mark Gibson with stage direction by Steven Goldstein. Street Scene runs Nov. 15 – 18 in UC’s Patricia Corbett Theater.
Visit CCM’s official Facebook page for a behind-the-scenes look at the production!
The Thursday, Nov. 15 performance of Street Scene will feature a pre-show talk by Kurt Weill Foundation for Music President Kim Kowalke at 7:15 p.m. in the Baur Room of UC’s Corbett Center for the Performing Arts.
Funded in part by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Inc., New York, N. Y.
CCM Season Presenting Sponsor and Musical Theatre Program Sponsor: The Otto M. Budig Family Foundation
ArtsWave: Community Partner
Macy’s: Mainstage Season Production Sponsor
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Weill’s early works show the influence of post-romanticism, expressionism, even atonality. Yet the desire to create “freer, lighter, and simpler” music grew on him. The early operas Royal Palace (1927) and The Czar Has his Photograph Taken (1928) show the influence of jazz and popular music. He began working with Bertolt Brecht in the spring of 1927, setting the “Mahagonny” poems. Mahagonny’s hummable tunes and thoroughgoing popular influence seemed calculated to shock the avant-garde; the charge that he had “sold out” to commercialism and abandoned art followed him thereafter. Later compositions, like The Threepenny Opera and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny elaborated on his popular style. But a much different style animates other works with Brecht, such as He Who Says Yes, an opera for students, and The Lindbergh Flight, a cantata.