THOMAS QUASTHOFF / KIRILL GERSTEIN
Both Thomas Quasthoff and Kirill Gerstein have a resolutely modern vision of their art, putting their considerable renown at the service of powerful messages. They perform Viktor Ullmann's Melodrama, composed in July 1944 shortly before his deportation.
Programme
VIKTOR ULLMANN (1898-1944)
The Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke, a melodrama for narrator and piano, based on the prose poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
Concert without interval
Thomas Quasthoff sings Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin, Op. 25, D. 795: No. 1, Das Wandern
July 1944. In the Theresienstadt camp, the antechamber to Auschwitz where he was waiting with his family, Viktor Ullmann wrote a work for piano inspired by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Three months later, he was murdered on arrival at the most notorious of the death camps. A close friend of Schoenberg and a pupil of Zemlinsky, Ullmann was a rare talent, taking an interest in dodecaphony, micro-tonality and the Bohemian musical heritage during a stay in Prague. Paradoxically, much of his work was composed in the Theresienstadt camp, when he was in charge of organising the “cultural life” of the camp in preparation for a meticulously staged Red Cross visit. The Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke, based on a poem by Rilke, dates from this period, and celebrates the spirit of the Roaring Twenties with all the tragedy befitting the circumstances of its composition. Quasthoff’s gravity and facetiousness, Gerstein’s flamboyant and tragic touch: such artists were needed to convey the emotional force of this work.