Music in War Time by PostClassical Ensemble

PostClassical Ensemble, conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez, presents Music in War Time: A Pearl Harbor Day Commemoration at the Washington National Cathedral.

PostClassical Ensemble, conducted by Spanish Music Director Angel Gil-Ordoñez, juxtaposes galvanizing responses to World War II by Dmitri Shostakovich, Arnold Schoenberg, and Hanns Eisler, to celebrate Pearl Harbor Day. This program, including film clips of the Pearl Harbor, the Siege of Leningrad, and FDR’s declaration of war on Japan, begins with a wartime Eisler/Brecht workers’ song sung as a processional.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 (1944) is a cry of pain provoked by the barbaric Nazi Siege of Leningrad, in which half a million died. Arnold Schoenberg’s seething and exalted Ode to Napoleon (1942), composed in Los Angeles in response to Pearl Harbor by a grateful Jewish refugee, uses Lord Byron’s Ode to Napoleon to excoriate Hitler and exalt FDR. Hanns Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook (1938-1943), composed in Los Angeles responds to Hitler, the war and the composer’s California exile.

Program

• Hanns Eisler: The Hollywood Songbook and Workers’ Songs
• Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2
• Arnold Schoenberg: The Ode to Napoleon

Featuring

• William Sharp, baritone
• Alexander Shtarkman, piano
• Members of PostClassical Ensemble, conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez
• The Cathedral Choir, conducted by Michael McCarthy
• Commentary by James Loeffler