I'm a Stranger Here Myself

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself“ – the title of the well-known song from the musical comedy One Touch of Venus (1943) by Kurt Weill could hardly be more befitting for our concert project.

With this concert programme, we focus on composers whose religion and ancestry were once rejected in Austria and Germany, who were ostracized and finally driven to emigration.

We explore the question how differently the composers affected dealt with this drastic and forced change in their artistic, cultural and private milieu, and how these changes affected their artistic oeuvre. Our concert aims to make emigration graspable and illustrate the phenomenon. The first part presents compositions written in Europe, the second those written in America.

On the one hand, the goal is to rediscover works which enjoyed immense popularity at the time they were written, but are hardly played today, and rescue them from oblivion; on the other, we wish to highlight the connections between composers and the circumstances of their life.

In the process, we will contextualize works by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, George Gershwin and others.

We are delighted that KS Angelika Kirchschlager has agreed to participate in this project. She has long engaged in an intense exploration of Kurt Weill’s music and has established herself as an ideal interpreter of his very special “song style”. For Kurt Weill, she finds the ideal tone – somewhere between grand opera singing and the inflection of the “chanson” – which only so few singers are able to hit. Effortlessly, she slips into the different female figures created by Weill and his various librettists; with her incredible sensitivity, she and her musical partners plumb the emotional depths of the characters.

The programme was performed on April 21, 2016 as part of the spring festival at the Brucknerhaus in Linz and on April 29, 2016 as part of the Jeunesse concerts at Vienna’s Konzerthaus.