Ensemble For These Times - Émigrés & Exiles in Hollywood

(Centaur Records, 2024)

Centaur Records

In the 1920s and ‘30s, Nazism created a new art genre, Entartete Kunst (Decadent Art), creative works that, according to the contemporary blowhards, “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill.”¹ While addressing the visual arts in particular, its political reach extended to cinema, literature, and music. Where the Nazi regime (specifically, Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich) highlighted the visual Entartete Kunst in exhibition from 19 July 1937 until 30 November, Hans Severus Ziegler curated Entartete Musik in Dusseldorf in May 1938.

Artists targeted by the Nazis went one of three places: internal exile (Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Boris Blacher), concentration camps (Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff), or exile abroad. The subjects of Ensemble For These Times’ Émigrés & Exiles in Hollywood belong to this latter group, having moved to the United States, particularly Los Angeles. Included here are, ERich Wolfgang Korngold, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexandre Tansman, Eric Zeisl, Hanns Eisler, Miklós Rózsa, Henryk Vars, and Bronislaw Kaper. The music ranges from Korngold’s Tanzlied des Pierrot from his opera Die tote Stadt, perfomed as piano-cello duet to the songs of Tansman and Vars, a brilliant mix of cinema and cabaret.

Ensemble For These Times is made up of soprano/Artistic Executive Director Nanette McGuinness, cellist Abigail Monroe, pianist Margaret Halbig (performing principals) , and co-founder/Senior Artistic Advisor composer David Garner. They are a specialized Trio who address the neglected niches in the world repertoire. This music is a good supplement to Decca’s 1990s series Entartete Musik that celebrated a broader swath of talent and compositions. The ensemble expresses an emotive power well suited to the band book being addressed. Historically adroit and culturally sensitive, the music in Émigrés & Exiles in Hollywood is as compelling now in its vindication as it was revolutionary in its infancy.

1. Spotts, Frederic (2002). Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. The Overlook Press. pp. 151–68.