Kurt Weill's song from Threepenny Opera. Performed live at The Jazz Bar in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Bremner Fletcher Duthie has spent 25 years exploring the songs that fascinate him and the strange artform that is kabarett (...or cabaret). From John Cage to Lou Reed, from Joni Mitchell to Charles Ives, and always with a special focus on the amazing songwriting of Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht, Bremner has reveled in recording and performing songs that sit at the edges of the canon of popular song.
Bremner was born in New York and grew up in the USA, Scotland and Canada. Singing is all he ever wanted to do. Every afternoon in New York, his family would hear him down the street singing his way home from school. He started with Punk Rock bands, moved on to singing Opera, and trained at the Centre for New Opera in Canada before moving on to Musical Theatre and Cabaret. He currently lives between New Orleans and Paris and is writing and singing his own songs inspired by the innovative, ground- breaking repertoire of the 1920's & 30's.
www.bremnersing...
Kurt Weill (1900-1950) began his career in the early 1920’s, after a musical childhood and several years of study in Berlin. By the time his first opera, The Protagonist (Georg Kaiser), was performed in April 1926, he was an established young German composer. But he had already decided to devote himself to the musical theater, and his works with Bertolt Brecht soon made him famous all over Europe. He fled the new Nazi leadership in March 1933 and continued his indefatigable efforts, first in Paris (1933-35), then in the U.S. until his death. Certain common threads tie together his career: a concern for social justice, an aggressive pursuit of highly-regarded playwrights and lyricists as collaborators, and the ability to adapt to audience tastes no matter where he found himself. His most important works: the Violin Concerto (1925), The Threepenny Opera (Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, 1928), Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Brecht and Hauptmann, 1930), The Pledge (Caspar Neher, 1932), The Seven Deadly Sins (Brecht, 1933), Lady in the Dark (Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin, 1941), Street Scene (Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes, 1947), Lost in the Stars (Maxwell Anderson, 1949). He died of heart failure in 1950, shortly after he and Anderson began work on a musical adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, leaving behind a large catalogue of works and a reputation that continues to grow as more of his music is performed.
Bertolt Brecht was one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century. His works include The Threepenny Opera (1928) with composer Kurt Weill, Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Good Person of Szechwan (1943), and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1958). Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, in 1898, and the two world wars directly affected his life and works. He wrote poetry when he was a student but studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After military service during World War I, he abandoned his medical studies to pursue writing and the theater.
A member of the Independent Social Democratic Party, Brecht wrote theater criticism for a Socialist newspaper from 1919 to 1921. His plays were banned in Germany in the 1930s, and in 1933, he went into exile, first in Denmark and then Finland. He moved to Santa Monica, California, in 1941, hoping to write for Hollywood, but he drew the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although he managed to deflect accusations of being a Communist, he moved to Switzerland after the hearings. He relocated to East Berlin in 1949 and ran the Berliner Ensemble, a theater company. As a director, he advocated the “alienation effect” in acting-an approach intended to keep the audience emotionally uninvolved in the plights of the characters.
5 окт 2024
