Kurt Weill’s »The Seven Deadly Sins«

Ensemble Modern

Wallis Giunta Mezzo-Sopran

amarcord
Wolfram Lattke – Tenor
Robert Pohlers – Tenor
Frank Ozimek – Bariton
Holger Krause – Bass

HK Gruber Leitung

The Weimar Republic’s urgent blend of desperate defiance and vast artistic possibility come together in this Ensemble Modern performance. It opens with Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 1, a masterstroke of postmodernism. Erich Korngold’s hit suite from Much Ado About Nothing offers an early glimpse at his wildly successful partnership with Max Reinhardt, more than a decade before they fled Europe and made Hollywood history. Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene is—almost certainly intentionally—not so much a film “accompaniment” as it is a full-fledged main attraction. Mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta joins in HK Gruber and Christian Muthspiel’s brand-new arrangement of The Seven Deadly Sins, a biting satire composed the same year Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s works were banned in their native Germany.