James Holmes, piano
Rebecca Jo Loeb and Alen Hodzovic, vocals
The 24th Kurt Weill Festival warmly invites you to a cultural feast to celebrate the age of the classic modernist movement. With more than 60 events in Dessau as well as at our other venues in Wörlitz, Wittenberg, Halle and Magdeburg, the Kurt Weill Festival for 2016 will again illuminate one of the most exciting periods of the 20th century. This time round the Festival is breaking ground with a new and intensive partnership with the Ernst Krenek Institut Privatstiftung based in Krems (Austria), the culmination of our long history of collaboration with national and international organizations.
Weill and Krenek were born in 1900; both men were leading figures in the culturally fertile period of the Weimar Republic; and both artists escaped persecution under the Nazis by fleeing to America. Their artistic impact before the Second World War is exemplified in The Threepenny Opera and Jonny spielt auf, works which ushered in a new type of music theatre that revolutionized artistic expression in music and drama.