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Sponsored by:
8:00 p.m. Santa Cruz Civic
Auditorium
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KURT WEILL The poignant story of Lost in the Stars, Kurt Weill's last Broadway piece before his untimely death at age 50, comes from the source of his inspiration, the novel about South African apartheid, Cry the Beloved Country. With the return of the Festival Chorus from their success in last year's Mass, and again under the direction of Milton Williams, many voices will join soprano Angelina Réaux to sing of freedom lost and found. It is in honor of the centenary of Weill's birth that Marin chose excerpts from Lost in the Stars and Marie Galante, to be performed by Réaux, who is considered the leading American interpreter of Weill's songs. "Réaux is America's most dramatic singer. She can sing with a disarming sweetness, gentle longing, passionate regret, deep anguish, white-hot rage, engaging wit, high hopes and worldly-wise cynicism, the voice of innocence and the voice of experience - often in the course of a single song," said Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe. "Kurt Weill," says Marin, "wrote music that lives beyond its context, that gains a life of its own." The scope of his work is amazing. He wrote orchestral music, Broadway tunes, cabaret, blues, jazz, and even penned Mack the Knife. Marie Galante is an earlier work, written when he lived in Paris. It is lushly instrumental, orchestrated with accordions, whistles and percussion, evocative of France in the 1930s. The great poet Langston Hughes wrote, "Kurt Weill was a great artist who could capture in his art the least common denominator uniting all humanity...He understood all human beings, and all their songs - for good songs are but the dreams, the hopes, and the inner cries deep in the souls of all the people of the world." "And sometimes it seems maybe God's gone away, Forgetting the promise that we heard him say." - from Lost in the Stars Christopher Rouse's Symphony No. 1, is "beautiful, introspective, painful," says Marin. "Rouse is so able to ride the emotional wave that we experience in America." Chief Critic of The Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed, said it is "suffused with slow somber Romantic gestures,...rage...turned to reflection." The Boston Globe wrote that Symphony No. 1 is "probably the most completely successful symphonic composition yet written by an American composer of his rising generation." "And we're lost out here in the stars, Little stars, big stars, blowing through the night, And we're lost out here in the stars, in the stars." - from Lost in the Stars TICKETS: $7-24  |
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