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| Soprano Angela Denoke (photo:© Johan Persson) |
The program started with a tribute to Berlin - Kurt Weill’s “Berlin in Lights” (celebrating the wonders of electric lighting) and the breezy “Under the Linden Trees” (music: Walter Kollo, lyrics: Rudolph Schanzer), the latter speaking of the delightful town and some of its people. This was a kindly, caressing opening to an evening presenting the troubled mood hovering above Germany between World War I and the rise of Hitler, as expressed in songs of a formula mixing poison and saccharine and performed in the cabarets around Berlin. Germany was now a democracy, meaning that art forms no longer suffered from censorship. Sometimes written in the simplest forms of popular music, these often-witty or acerbic songs describe the state of society of the time, venting political dissatisfaction and the mood of decadence, disappointment and despair. And, of course, there are some love songs. Most of the cabaret composers were classically trained, many Jewish, many in exile. Promoting the genre were the original voices of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, whose songs formed a substantial part of the program. Taking a somewhat naive form, “To the Little Radio” (Hanns Eisler, Brecht) tells of a Jewish man fleeing from the Nazis with his little radio. It comes from Eisler’s “Hollywood Songbook”, compiled when the composer was in exile in the USA. From the same collection, we heard “On Suicide”, sensitively performed by the artists, Denoke’s use of her uniquely-timbred yet unforced low register adding to the song’s eerie agenda. From Kurt Weill’s “Berlin Requiem” (1920), the “Ballad of the Drowned Girl”, one of Brecht’s most potent masterpieces, Balshai’s minimal setting gives the grisly details of the text centre stage, as Denoke relates the tragic story of 20-year-old Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg’s rotting body drifting down the Landwehr Canal...“it so happened that she had slipped from God’s thoughts”.
Friedrich Hollaender (1896-1976) was one of the most prolific composers and lyricists of cabaret song literature in Berlin between 1918 and 1933, writing over 200 songs, demonstrating his ability to adapt to the swiftly evolving tastes and expectations of cabaret audiences during the tumultuous Weimar Era, addressing political and social issues and adapting folktales. His repertoire spans playful character pieces to defiant antimilitarist statements and poignant illustrations of poverty and hardship, and via an economy of musical means. Hollaender’s songs were well represented at the JICMF concert. In one of the ensemble’s many encores, “Peter, Peter, come back to me”, associated with the voice of Marlene Dietrich, Angela Denoke (addressing Tim Park!) expresses the woman’s misgivings at having been unfaithful to her best fellow, Peter. In “Chuck all the men out of the Reichstag”, Denoke gives zest to the text and its message: women are letting us know they have found their voice and are ready to stand together for a new feminist movement and for professional equality.
On an evening in the late 1920's or early 1930's, Berlin night crawlers might have slipped into the celebrated Tingel-Tangel club, which was run by Hollaender, or one could visit Kurt Robischek's Cabaret of Comedians (‘Kabarett der Komiker’, popularly called ‘Kadeko’) where the music of Mischa Spoliansky reigned. The advent of sound films ushered in a second career for Mischa Spoliansky, as a cinema composer. In the film “Love No More”, released in 1931, Margo Lion gave a raucous rendering of Spoliansky’s “You can’t Live without Love”, (lyrics: Robert Gilbert). Spoliansky himself appeared in the film, billed as ‘Piano Man’. Denoke’s performance of the song, however, was mellifluous and colored with dynamic variation. Her singing of Spoliansky’s “The Lavender Song” carried a sense of urgency, with the refrain spelling out the song’s message with the greatest of articulacy. Written in 1920 under the pseudonym of Arno Billing (lyrics: Kurt Schwabach) this song was dedicated to the German-Jewish physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and is considered one of the first gay anthems:
‘Why the tormentto impose
morals of others on us?
We, listen to this,
are what we are,
even if they want to hang us.
But who thinks,
that we are going to be hanged
for that one we would have to feel sorry
but soon, listen up,
all of a sudden
our sun will be shining too…’
Werner Richard Heymann was the most famous film composer in Germany and France until 1933. His music was heard from the orchestra pits of the great theatre stages and on the battered pianos of tiny cabaret cellars. A serious classical composer, Heymann once confessed that he had never intended to write popular songs, but it seems he learned to enjoy writing them. One of the most spine-chilling moments of the Jerusalem event was Denoke’s performance of Heymann’s “The Cold”; her portrayal of the poor and homeless was haunting, the chill almost palpable in both the arrangement and especially in Denoke’s singing.
Tal Balshai has made a deep enquiry into the genre of German cabaret songs. His reworkings of the piano accompaniments for trio are artistic and elegant, offering each player possibilities for personal expression and involvement in each verbal text; the instrumental roles reflect the emotional complexity of the repertoire. All three instrumentalists took up the challenge, adding much aesthetic pleasure to the evening. Balshai and Angela Denoke read each other well: they have been working together for 11 years. Angel Denoke is an extraordinary artist: she is comfortable on stage, charming, natural and unmannered, as she communicates with her audience and players. She enlists her fresh, rich and flexible voice in each item, appealing directly to the listener’s emotions. A real treat for the German speakers amongst us, it was the kind of concert you did not want to end!
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