The least celebrated of next year’s centenaries
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Go back a hundred years. This album, a dazzling act of creative programming by Bavarian Radio, covers three young composers in hyperinflationary Berlin and a fourth dancing away on the fringes.
Picture yourself in the capital of a defeated empire, ravaged by street fighting and insecurity of every kind. It is 1923 and broadcasting has just begun on the Potsdamer Platz. Music students write whatever comes to ear in the hope of getting it on air. At the conservatoire, Ferruccio Busoni checks their scores and challenges them to go further. In the clubs and cabarets, they jive the night away. A loaf of rye bread costs five billion marks but the music rages all around…
Read on here.
En francais ici.
The screenshot is from Babylon Berlin, a Netflix show that is very much worth watching. I suggest the German original with subtitles rather than the awkwardly dubbed English version.
It‘s not on Netflix. Just saying.
Bartok’s Dance Suite shared the program (celebrating the 50th anniversary of the uniting of Buda, Pest and Obuda into Budapest) with two other world premieres: Dohnanyi’s Festival Overture and, much more importantly, Kodaly’s Psalmus Hungaricus. Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasia for piano and orchestra rounded out the program. It would be worth reproducing that concert this year!
I applaud your programming suggestion. When Antal Dorati was music director of the National Symphony, he presented the “Psalmus Hungaricus” in two different years. The respective tenor soloists were both Hungarian: Robert Ilosfalvy and Lajos Kozma.
More information is needed here. What record label is this on? . . . I don’t see a CD or record cover either.
With the fact that they actually burned money instead of wood in the winter of 1923, because the bills weren’t worth their weight, it much surprises me that manuscripts were saved at that time.
I conducted the Toch with the Theatre Chamber Players in the late 1980s or early 1990s, performances at the Library of Congress and Kennedy Center. Fascinating piece which we all enjoyed very much.