Music on the Brink of War

Nasher Sculpture Center Announces Final Soundings Concert of the Season: Music on the Brink of War

Performance includes seminal 1912 work, Pierrot Lunaire, by Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill cabaret, with text by playwright Bertolt Brecht, in partnership with SOLUNA International Music and Arts Festival

The Nasher Sculpture Center closes out its fifth anniversary season of the critically acclaimed Soundings music series with the performance Music on the Brink of War on Wednesday, May 20 at 7:30 pm, with soprano Lucy Shelton performing Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg followed by a Kurt Weill cabaret, with text by Bertolt Brecht, performed by actors Walter Van Dyk and Liza Sadovy. The performance will take place in the upstairs gallery.

“For the inaugural year of SOLUNA International Music and Arts Festival, we are delighted to present a dynamic performance at the Nasher Sculpture Center,” says Nasher Director Jeremy Strick. “The lively blend of music, dance and poetry that these talented musicians and actors have developed, under the direction of Seth Knopp, will close out the fifth anniversary season of Soundings with a tremendous energy, artistic complexity, and invention, qualities that make this series so compelling and important for Dallas.”

The first part of the concert will feature Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a melodrama comprised of the German translation of 21 poems by the French poet Albert Giraud. Since its premiere in 1912, 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,’” says Soundings Artistic Director Seth Knopp. Both Schoenberg and Kurt Weill (with dramatist Bertolt Brecht), whose Threepenny Opera, Mahogany and Happy Days appeared alongside the first stirrings of the Second World War, found the cabaret to be an environment conducive to blurring lines separating art and popular music, and the socialist and capitalist worlds to which their music reacted. 

For the Kurt Weill songs, the group will be performing with a band of musicians that resembles the small ensemble for whom the Weill songs were originally orchestrated. Michael Haslam, the pianist that accompanies Walter Van Dyk and Liza Sadovy and is their collaborator, has made arrangements of all the songs specifically for this ensemble of musicians.

Tickets are $20 for members, $25 for non-members, and $10 for students and educators.

To Purchase tickets go to: http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/engage/event?id=150

Presented in partnership with the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family SOLUNA International Music & Arts Festival.

Nasher Sculpture Center
2001 Flora Street
Dallas, Texas 75201
214.242.5100
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