“The Golden Twenties”: A night at the Moka Efti
One night in the legendary coffee house Moka Efti! Members of the Berliner Philharmoniker play dance music of the 1920s – foxtrots and shimmies, tangos and blues ballads. Kurt Weill is represented with three works, among them the Kleine Dreigroschenmusik. Stefan Wolpe’s Suite from the Twenties and Mátyás Seiber’s Two Jazzolettes reflect the jazz craze of the time. Between the works, Dagmar Manzel reads texts by Trude Hesterberg, Lotte Lenya and Josephine Baker.
What the three composers on the programme have in common is not only that, as Jewish artists, they were driven into exile by National Socialism, but also that their works combined an interest in the musical avant-garde with an open-mindedness towards contemporary light and dance music: Stefan Wolpe impressively mixed jazz and atonality in the pieces of the Suite from the Twenties, while in his Two Jazzolettes, Mátyás Seiber produced an encounter between blues and swing with twelve-tone rows.
This evening marks the conclusion of the festival’s focus on Kurt Weill. Whereas the Kleine Dreigroschenmusik is limited to wind instruments, the Suite panaméenne also features a small string ensemble. In the latter work, based on Weill’s stage work Marie galante, which he wrote while in exile in France, a tango, a march and a foxtrot frame the instrumental version of the famous song Youkali. In this concert, the authentic Berlin tone is completed by the participation of Dagmar Manzel, one of the city’s best-known film, theatre and television actors who has enjoyed great success in various productions at the Komische Oper.
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