Step back in time for a specially created show bursting with the songs and street music of 1920s Berlin.
Art created during the Weimar Republic was suffused with echoes of street life and popular culture: with noisy crowds in bustling streets and markets, the clatter of patriotic marches and political rallies, and, above all, the songs of the cabaret singers.
Satirical, sentimental, rebellious and subversive, the songs of the cabaret were picked up and exploited by the ‘serious’ composers of the day. In To the Cabaret!, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts music from Kurt Weill to Friedrich Hollaender, who composed some of the greatest cabaret songs in history, including those made famous by Marlene Dietrich.
The spirit of the cabaret is reflected on-screen in still and moving images – of cartoons and paintings, scraps of films and photographs, and snatches from poems, stories, plays, diaries and letters – transporting us to that brief and uncertain carnival a hundred years ago, when for a moment a brightly lit interlude intervened between the darkness of two political and human catastrophes.