This year, KunstKlang Feuchtwangen, a festival founded by Christiane Karg, is a part of the “1700 years of Jewish life in Germany” jubilee. One of the concerts, “Erzähl, dass mein Haus im Kolchos ich fand …” (“Tell them that my home is now in the kolkhoz”) presents Dmitry Shostakovich’s “From Jewish Folk Poetry” op. 79a, in the original arrangement for three vocalists and piano; the vocalists are Christiane Karg herself, Nadine Weissmann, and Siyabonga Maqungo, and Ulrike Payer accompanies them at the piano.
The concert’s title, by the way, is a line from Song No. 9 “A Good Life”; the singer tells of his earlier suffering in stark poverty and how the kolkhoz now offers him a home and everything else he needs. It was one of three songs added in the vain hope of making the cycle more palatable to Stalin’s then-rampant anti-Semitism.
Also part of the festival is a matinée paying homage to Joseph Schmidt, a star tenor in the 1930s.
“A star falls …”, as his epitaph says: Mere days after escaping the Nazi hordes into Switzerland, Joseph Schmidt, the star tenor of his day, succumbed to a heart attack at the age of only thirty-four years. Christiane Karg and Siyabonga Maqungo dedicate a matinée to his memory, “Ein Lied geht um die Welt” (“My Song Goes Round the World”).
Kunstklang Feuchtwangen
“Erzähl, dass mein Haus im Kolchos ich fand …”: The friendship between Mieczysław Weinberg and Dmitry Shostakovich
Siyabonga Maqungo: tenor
Oct 30th 8pm.
“Ein Lied geht um die Welt”: Arias and lieder in memoriam Joseph Schmidt
Oct. 31st 11am.