Swept Away Festival

Swept Away Festival: Berlin and Vienna in the Twenties

Featuring Eleven UK Premieres of Music from the
‘Lost Generation’ of German composers

Music in 1920s Berlin and Vienna: sleek, jazzy, and with a very modern aesthetic. Yet by 1934, denounced by the Nazi government and their music banned, composers were swept away into exile.

The Continuum Ensemble presents the ‘Swept Away’ Festival at London’s Kings Place in June 2015 with a rich three-day programme of vivid miniature opera (‘zeitoper’), cabaret songs, and inventive chamber and orchestral music by Ernst Toch, Kurt Weill and other composers of this lost generation. Eleven works will be performed for the first time in the U.K., mostly by Viennese-born, Jewish composer Ernst Toch, having lain neglected for over 70 years.

Ripe for rediscovery are the UK premieres of Ernst Toch’s complete ‘Gesprochene Musik’ (‘Spoken Music’) – the first piece ever written for spoken choir of which the third movement, ‘Geographical Fugue’, is a cult work; the beguiling song cycle ‘The Chinese Flute’ featuring soprano Sarah Tynan and the witty ‘opera in miniature’ ‘Egon und Emilie’: a fifteen-minute satire on the ambitions of grand opera, and its dramatic and emotional excesses. Audiences also have the chance to hear Kurt Weill’s ‘Berliner Requiem’, censored at its first and only performance on German radio due to its politically explosive content. A programme of chamber works showcases the influence that dance and jazz had on the music of the time, and, lastly, no series on this period would be complete without a cabaret song evening. Performed by singers Lucy Schaufer and Anna Dennis this selection of witty and sophisticated cabaret-revue songs contains examples of early jazz, foxtrots, tangos and blues, spliced with the lyricism of German operetta.

An illuminating series of talks on art, music, cinema and cultural life; readings of poetry, drama and fiction of the period; plus a vital discussion on refugee artists in Europe today completes an intriguing series exploring Berlin’s music scene in the 1920s - this fascinating period in recent history.