Soprano Karyn Levitt celebrates the influence of European culture on American music in a trio of concerts with piano presented by MetropolitanZoom

On Sunday, August 30, 2020 at 3 pm EST:

“On Hollywood and Weimar: The Songs of European Composers from the Golden Age of Film”

On Sunday, October 18, 2020 at 3 pm EST:

“Will There Still Be Singing? A Hanns Eisler Cabaret”

On Sunday, December 6, 2020 at 3 pm EST:

“The Age of Romance: From Vienna to Broadway”

GoldenLand Concerts announces soprano Karyn Levitt’s trio of upcoming live, virtual performances presented by MetropolitanZoom, an innovative concert experience.

Music director and pianist Jed Distler will be featured in the August 30 performance, while Eric Ostling will play Ms. Levitt's concerts on both October 18 and December 6. The concerts are thematically related and will be given new life online. Each pays unique homage to its artistic source and inspiration -- the influence of European culture on American music -- and highlights the contributions of Jewish composers whose creative genius shaped Hollywood, Broadway, and modern classical music. 

The first show, On Hollywood and Weimar: The Songs of European Composers from the Golden Age of Film, honors the remarkable composers who found themselves in exile in California in the first half of the last century.

Much of Hollywood's greatest film music was written by émigré and exiled composers who fled Nazi Europe for Southern California. Musical geniuses like Kurt Weill, Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Friedrich Hollaender, brought from their respective homelands the highest level of culture, which they poured into American movies. From dusty westerns and sweeping romances to the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock. On Hollywood and Weimar celebrates the blending of the old world and the new to produce the uniquely hybrid sound of Hollywood, with songs of European composers from the Golden Age of Film.

Following three sold-out performances of On Hollywood and Weimar last year at Feinstein’s/54 Below, Triad Theater and Off-Broadway's York Theatre, Karyn Levitt looks forward to giving the online premiere for the venerable New York nightclub, Metropolitan Room, in its virtual reincarnation, MetropolitanZoom. 

Commented Bernie Furshpan about MetropolitanZoom: “Our new, virtual nightclub enables performers to see their audience on large screens. By reinstating that all-important visual connection across the footlights, the experience of the live event happening in real time at the same time for performers and audience alike is solved. In the COVID era, MetropolitanZoom is a game changer."

Soprano Karyn Levitt states: “We’ve intentionally chosen Sundays at 3PM for all three concerts, so that people in Europe and around the world can experience the wide-ranging music of the European composers we’re performing whose creative genius shaped Hollywood, Broadway, and modern classical music.”

Award-winning music journalist and acclaimed book author James Gavin wrote to Karyn Levitt after the York Theater premiere:

“Karyn: BRAVA! [...] I cannot congratulate or praise you enough for the beautiful work you did, for introducing me to a repertoire and stories that were mostly new to me, and for your terrific and expressive singing. [...] What a rich theme you chose, and you drew the ultimate depth out of it. [...] It was my honor to be there to experience a show that good. It taught me a lot and gave me so much pleasure.”

Ms. Levitt offers a compelling, dramatic, narrative frame that provides a rich historical context for each song. Jed Distler created the Max Steiner medley for the show.

Get your Tickets at MetropolitanZoom here

Admission to each show is $25. A discount of 20% is offered for advance purchase of admission to all three performances (using CODE: Levitt3).

The second show is Will There Still Be Singing? A Hanns Eisler Cabaret. Austro-German composer Hanns Eisler, whose music was branded by the Nazis as "degenerate," was a student of Schoenberg, a contemporary of Kurt Weill, and Brecht's favorite collaborator. Karyn Levitt is THE performer of the English Eisler/Brecht repertoire of our time. Her close working relationship with her late mentor, Brecht translator and friend Eric Bentley, gave her the special opportunity to consult with a contemporary witness and the source of the acclaimed translations to excite the next generation with Hanns Eisler's music and Bertolt Brecht's lyrics.

Hanns Eisler songs and music with words from Bertolt Brecht, in English adaptation by Eric Bentley. Pianist Eric Ostling composed the Hanns Eisler medley for the show.

Ms. Levitt is among the leading Lied singers in the highly demanding Eisler repertoire: "Karyn Levitt is able to achieve great poetic beauty by blending the words and the music to form an artful and contradictory whole, at once unusual and touching." (Peter Deeg, IHEG, 2016)

As a distinguished artist/producer, Ms. Levitt is known for her historic collaboration with the late Eric Bentley -- whose centennial tribute, hosted by Michael Riedel and featuring Tony Kushner, Austin Pendleton, James Shapiro, Harold Bloom, and other literary and theater luminaries, she produced at The Town Hall in New York City and whose work she also recorded on her CD, “Eric Bentley's Brecht-Eisler Song Book.”

Get your Tickets at MetropolitanZoom here

The third show, The Age of Romance: From Vienna to Broadway, which was first premiered at Carnegie’s Weill Hall in 2007 to a sold-out house, celebrates romantic operetta composers Franz Lehar, Johann Strauss, and Victor Herbert, and how their great musical tradition was successfully Americanized and translated to early Broadway stages and Hollywood musicals by European-born American composers Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml, and Frederick Loewe, as well as American-born composer Jerome Kern. Selections from The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, The Student Prince, The New Moon, The Desert Song, The Vagabond King, Showboat, Roberta, and My Fair Lady, are among the works featured in this sparkling presentation.

Get your Tickets at MetropolitanZoom here

About MetropolitanZoom

The MetropolitanZoom Virtual Night Club is putting performers and their audiences back together again in a unique and creative way. The host of New York City's legendary Metropolitan Room will virtually greet and check you in individually (just as if you'd come to the theater itself) and prepare you to enter the mindset of attending a show in person. The magic of Zoom is that the live on-stage production will not only be beautifully live-streamed with superior sound, but the performers will be able to see their audience, live and in real time.

For interviews with Karyn Levitt and further questions please contact:

Peter Dingens
International Public and Artist Relations
Devrientweg 15
12207 Berlin
Germany
tel. 49-30-67813239
mobile 49-178-6337820
office@peterdingens.com