ADMISSION:
Admission is free. Reservations required. RSVP beginning Tuesday, December 6, at 9 a.m.

USC Students, Staff, and Faculty: RSVP
USC Alumni: RSVP
General Public: RSVP

DESCRIPTION:
Explore the musical and political roots of Kurt Weill (“Mack the Knife,” “Moon of Alabama”) in a special evening of performance and conversation with violin virtuoso and humanitarian Daniel Hope and distinguished pianist, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra music director, and USC Thornton professor Jeffrey Kahane. They will share insights on Weill's compositions, life, and career as a young composer in 1920s Berlin, before he fled Nazi Germany and became one of Broadway's most enduring songwriters.

LACO musicians and USC Thornton faculty and students will join Hope and Kahane in a performance featuring Weill's major chamber works, including the Sonata for Cello and Piano, String Quartet No. 1, early songs, and vocal duets, as well as excerpts from Little Threepenny Music. Hope will also join students for a performance of Gideon Klein's great String Trio, composed in the Terezin concentration camp shortly before the 26-year-old composer was deported to Auschwitz.

This concert is presented as part of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s "Lift Every Voice" project, a three-week event series inspired by the lives and legacies of courageous émigrés Kurt Weill and Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who were outspoken activists in America’s civil-rights movement.

Artist Bios:

British violinist Daniel Hope has performed as a virtuoso soloist with the world’s major orchestras for 25 years. The winner of the 2015 European Cultural Prize for Music, he is an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist and the music director of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. Hope was a key participant in the documentary Refuge in Music and the album Terezín/Theresienstadt, both of which showcase works by composers murdered by the Nazis. (Twitter)

Conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane is a soloist with the New York and Los Angeles philharmonics, the San Francisco Symphony, and other major orchestras, and has collaborated with artists and chamber ensembles including Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, and the Emerson and Takács quartets. He is wrapping up his final season as music director of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and is a visiting professor of keyboard studies at the USC Thornton School of Music.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative. Organized by the USC Thornton School of Music and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra as part of LACO’s “Lift Every Voice” project. Co-sponsored by Ned and Dana Newman, and Ruth L. Eliel and Bill Cooney.

Photo (Daniel Hope): Margaret Malandruccolo/DG
Photo (Jeffrey Kahane): Colorado Symphony Orchestra