HK GRUBER, KIRILL GERSTEIN & STUDENTS OF THE BARENBOIM-SAID AKADEMIE

Rarely in European history have art, entertainment, and political activism been more closely intertwined than in the years of the Weimar Republic. Composer, conductor, and singer HK Gruber, a renowned expert for this musical era, and pianist Kirill Gerstein explore a time of radical social change in songs by Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill. The program’s second half is dedicated to Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, another musical manifesto against tyranny, based on a scathingly satirical poem by Lord Byron and written in 1942–3 during the composer’s American exile.