Degenerate Music revealed
Emanuele Torquati’s Piano Recital
The project “Degenerate Music revealed” has been premiered during 2007 Concert Season in Vancouver B.C. for the Jewish Culture Center at Norman Rothstein Theatre and afterwards toured in France and Italy. Recently, it has been slated in Chicago, at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, and in Krakow, at the Galicja Jewish Museum.
Pianist Emanuele Torquati, involved in a long research inside the 20th century piano repertoire, presents a wide selection of some outstanding works written by composers whose careers, and in may instances whose very life, were destroyed by the Nazi Holocaust, both in Italy and Germany.
The term “Degenerated Music” had been the title of a grotesque educational fair organized by the party in Dusseldorf in 1938. During the 1930s the term “degenerate” had become a buzzword for any art or music not acceptable to Hitler’s Third Reich.
Many Jewish composers, among them Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Kurt Weill fled the Austro-German orbit during the 1930s; many who didn’t, perished in concentration camps, like the Milan born Aldo Finzi and Erwin Schulhoff.
The work of these five composers is here presented and “ultimately, wheter you refer to these compostions as Degenerated Music or Holocaust Music, they reveal a legitimacy that transcends mere labels”, as conductor James Conlon says.
Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942)
Four Fantasies on poems by Richard Dehmel op.9
Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco (1895-1945)
Le Danze del Re David, Jewish Rhapsody on traditional themes
Aldo Finzi (1897-1945)
Fox Trot, Slow Waltz
Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942)
Hot Music, ten syncopated Etudes for piano (1928)
Kurt Weill (1900-1950)
Songs from the Three-penny Opera (arr. M. Formenti)
September’s Song (arr. G. Cardini)
