crescendo 2025: InnenSaiten [EN]
Displaced and Disremembered? Julia Kerr and Wilhelm Grosz – crescendo
A cooperation project within the framework of „Oxford x UdK Berlin – Seedfunding for Creative Collaborations“
The fate of the Kerr family in exile is widely known through Judith Kerr's semi-fictionalized memoirs. While the poet and critic Alfred (1865-1948) takes up a great deal of space in Judith Kerr's memoirs, the artistic achievements of her mother Julia (1898-1965) are barely mentioned; yet the graduate of the Stern Conservatory achieved public success with the operas Die schöne Lau (1928, premiered on German radio) and Der Chronoplan (1933-1952). Her far more private songs, a selection of which can be experienced for the first time in this concert, allow new insights into Julia Kerr's lived experience in her German homeland and in exile in England.
The student of Franz Schreker and Viennese-born Wilhelm Grosz (1894-1939) had an enormously broad musical talent. This is reflected in his many genres as a composer of symphonic works, operas, operettas, piano and chamber music, songs, cabaret, stage, film and radio music (radio operetta) and pop songs (Isle of Capri, Red Sails in the Sunset). At the beginning of the 1920s, Grosz was one of the very first to incorporate jazz idioms into his works. Having taken up his work as a music producer for the early Berlin record company “Ultraphon” in 1928, he was forced to abruptly end his work in 1933. He fled to London and then into exile in New York, where he died far too early in 1939.
Julia Kerr: Selected songs from her estate (first public presentation) | Wilhelm Grosz: Three rondels for soprano and piano op. 11, Excerpts from „Bänkel und Balladen" op.31, Three Pieces for Piano op. 33 Nr. 2 „Viennese Elegy“, Excerpts from II. Tanzsuite op. 20
Malina Höfflin, Yoona Jang, Mezzosoprano / Guillaume Durand Piketty, Gottlieb Wallisch (UdK Berlin), Piano / Christian Leitmeir (University of Oxford), Presentation
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crescendo – Künstlerisches Betriebsbüro der Fakultät Musik
crescendo@udk-berlin.de