This page contains a single entry from the blog All I Know².
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
As part of the ongoing Berkeley Arts Festival, Jerry Kuderna and Nora Lennox Martin gave an impressive performance of Hanns Eisler's 18 Songs on texts of Bertolt Brecht in downtown Berkeley last night in the abandoned Fidelity Savings building on Shattuck Avenue.
Kuderna began the evening with Arnold Schoenberg's Piano Piece, opus 33b (1933), one of the composer's earliest pieces from his exile in California. And it concluded with Roger Sessions' Piano Sonata #3 (1965).
But the Eisler was the central attraction. It's not clear (at least to me) when these songs, published by Breitkopf as "Die Ausgewälte Lieder", were written. The Brecht poems date from the 30's and 40's and into the mid 50's -- before, during, and after the Second World War.
Eisler was a student of Arnold Schoenberg in the 20's in Berlin, and later worked with Brecht on stage productions, film, and chamber music. Eisler left Europe ahead of the Nazi's, and lived in the US from 1938-48. He earned two Oscars for his film music before being expelled by the House Un-American Activities Committee. From 1949 until his death in 1962, Eisler was an important figure in the musical life of East Germany.
The texts of these songs are, as expected, dark. „Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten“ ("Truly, I live in the darkest times) Brecht writes in the Elegy from 1939. Eisler's accompaniement is colored with irony and foreboding.
The Kuderna/Martin performance was riviting. Nora Martin's angelic voice added a striking contrast to the devastating words of the poet. With translations of the texts conveniently projected on the wall, the audience immediately felt the weight of those darkest times, even as the sounds of the streets outside threatened to overtake the performance. Full, rapt attention was not to be deterred by skateboarders and car horns tonight. This was, after all, an awesome performance.
And I don't think the relevance to the political situation here today escaped many in the audience.
The opening and closing pieces, the Shoenberg and Sessions works, altho some 30 years apart, share a common ground with each other, and with the Eisler. While Eisler abandoned his teacher, Schoenberg, early on, the influence of the second Viennese school could still be heard in his piano writing -- but with a palatable ironic twist.
Sessions, perhaps the lone American composer to have completely fallen under Schoenberg's style, wrote his 3rd Sonata in response to the Kennedy assassination. With it he unleashed a torrent of notes in waves of contrasting emotions. Jerry Kuderna mentioned that it may have taken him six or more years to master this single work and to get to the point where he fully understood it all. Kuderna's mastery of this extreme piece of piano writing was clearly apparent.
There is a wonderful website devoted to the Subject: Hanns Eisler that is worth visiting. For one thing, I didn't realize all the films Eisler was involved in, going back to the 1920's. Some of them are now available on DVD (and have made their way onto my own Netflix queue.)
And, I've been told to expect the video of last night's performance to make it's way onto the Berkeley Arts Festival website sometime soon. Something to certainly look forward to.
