This is one of the concerts of the Opus Amadeus Chamber Music Festival, an event that has been mounted since 2012 by Artisan Organizasyon. The arias to be performed on this occasion are by Handel, Mozart, the Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Gomes (1836-1896), Bizet, Puccini, the American musical theatre composer and theatrical producer Mitch Leigh (1928-2014), and Kurt Weill (1900-1950), a popular German-Jewish composer who fled Germany for the United States in 1933.
Joe Mabel, writing on the ‘weillproject’ website, has this to say about Weill’s Youkali, the song that is to be performed on March 16: ‘Having escaped from Nazi Germany, Weill attempted rather successfully during his roughly two years in Paris to write songs that would gain the same sort of popularity with the French public as he had achieved with the more progressive portion of the German public in the era of the Weimar Republic: hence the distinctly French flavour of this gorgeous Euro-tango.’
Issue 67, December 2024
Beauty in the Wilderness
