Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Jewish music and theatre (Sydney, Australia)
The fourth festival for Performing the Jewish Archive, held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Seymour Centre.
| Type | Festival |
|---|---|
| Date | 5th August 2017 - 12th August 2017 |
Out of the Shadows (Sydney) was a week-long festival held in partnership with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney. Over 300 performers played to 2100 audience members across the festival. The opening night of the festival featured symphonic music for dance by Jewish composers who had fled Central Europe following the rise of the Nazis, with a fully-staged version of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s ballet chanté Seven Deadly Sins, directed by Chryssy Tintner, daughter of the refugee composer and conductor, Georg Tintner. Other major performances in the festival included Wilhelm Grosz's children’s opera, Red-Riding-Hood, three performances of a reconstructed cabaret from the Terezín Ghetto, Prince Bettliegend, an English-Yiddish revue from Depression-era Helsinki, The Merchants of Helsinki, an evening of sacred and secular Jewish music for choir and organ, and a concluding concert of vignettes and masterpieces from Australia's finest chamber music ensemble, the Goldner String Quartet.
Four lunchbreak concerts featured music for violin and piano, music for clarinet, mezzo-soprano and piano, chamber works wind, brass and percussion, and a concert of string trios with an additional quartet arrangement.
Two internationally renowned guest speakers presented research that resonated with the overall aims of the project: Associate Professor Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) and Assistant Professor Brigid Cohen (NYU). These scholars were key respondents in an academic symposium held at the Sydney Jewish Museum following the Festival, entitled Performance, Trauma, Empathy and the Archive, convened by Dr Avril Alba and Dr Joseph Toltz.
Some of Australia's best musicians, singers, actors, choreographers and dancers featured in the festival: the Goldner String Quartet, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellowship directed by Roger Benedict, Sydney Philharmonia VOX Choir directed by Elizabeth Scott, Sydney Children's Choir, Luminescence Chamber Singers, Three's Company (Deborah De Graaff, Tonya Lemoh and Narelle Yeo), Ole Bøhn and Daniel Herscovitch, Benjamin Adler, Charlotte Fetherston, Noam Yaffe and Joseph Eisinger.
New works were presented by Sydney Conservatorium of Music composers Daniel Biederman, Solomon Frank, Katrina Kovacs and Victoria Pham, as well as new chamber orchestra arrangements by Aidan Rosa (arranging the work Schuld-Kain by Marcel Lorber) and Ian Whitney (arranging the work Dybbuk by Simon Parmet) and a new string quartet arrangement by Joseph Toltz (arranging Phantasia Judaica by Boas Bischofswerder). World premiere performances of works by Wilhelm Grosz, HA Peter and Georg Tintner sat beside Australian premieres of works by Simon Parmet, Moses Pergament and Mieczesław Weinberg. All musical performances took place in Verbrugghen Hall, the same space where so many Jewish refugee composers and performers first gave recitals in Sydney in the 1930s and 40s.
