Swept Away: Music of a Lost Generation

‘Mahagonny Songspiel and Berliner Requiem were brilliantly undertaken, the latter in a programme with the BBC Singers‘

Sunday Times

Swept Away features music by German and Austrian composers who fled into exile in the early 1930s, persecuted and threatened with arrest for their Jewish origins, socialist political views and artistic modernism. Their music was banned from performance and publication, thus completely disappearing until long after WWII ended and even the deaths of many of the composers.
Conceived, programmed and led in performance by Philip Headlam, the three day festival brought this unjustly neglected music back into the light and revealed its outstanding quality and engaging modernity over five programmes of opera, chamber, choral and orchestral music as well as cabaret-theatre songs alongside pre-concert talks, films and literary readings at Kings Place concert hall, London in June 2015. Eleven pieces were performed in the U.K. for the first time.
Featured were Ernst Toch, hailed as the most promising young German/Austrian composer of the 1920s and Kurt Weill’s music for concert, theatre and radio from the 1920s as well as composers Paul Hindemith, Erwin Schulhoff, Stefan Wolpe, Ernst Krenek and cabaret composers Mischa Spoliansky, Friedrich Hollander and Wilhelm Grosz.
Soloists included sopranos Sarah Tynan, Anna Dennis, Donna Bateman, mezzo sopranos Lucy Schaufer and Martha Jones, tenor Andrew Rees, bass Barnaby Rea, cellist Joseph Spooner, violinist Hugo Ticciati and flautist Lisa Nelsen as well as Douglas Finch, piano. Philip Headlam conducted The Continuum Ensemble and the BBC Singers, broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
Lawrence Weschler, grandson of Ernst Toch, spoke about Toch’s life in Germany and exile in the U.S. Festival patrons were conductors James Conlon and Lawrence Foster and author Daniel Snowman.