It's wonderful - American Music from Broadway

The vocal ensemble Musica Classica under the direction of Willi Derungs, together with soloists, violinist Alexandre Dubach and pianist Christoph Zbinden, presents a lively and entertaining concert with highlights from Broadway music. The program will be performed semi-staged.

In addition to excerpts from George Gershwin's opera "Porgy and Bess", highlights from musicals from the 1920s to 1950s will be performed, including Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story", Richard Rodgers' "Me and Juliet", "The Sound of Music" and "Carousel", as well as musicals by Cole Porter such as "Anything Goes", "Fifty Million Frenchmen" and "Can-Can" and pieces by Jerome Kern.

In the history of music since 1900, there are, in simple terms, three art forms of musical theater that have enjoyed worldwide success and were also economically viable: firstly, Italian opera, secondly, Viennese operetta and thirdly, American musical comedy. The theaters on Broadway in the heart of New York staged musical productions around the clock. A play that didn't pass the Broadway test didn't exist for the American public. Or in other words: Nowhere in the world is one so sensitive to dilettantism in the field of craftsmanship as on Broadway. As a result, all Broadway musicals met high artistic and entertainment standards and the demand for new works was great, even though some musicals ran successfully for years. Composers such as Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Leonard Bernstein were kings of Broadway. Many of their musicals are still long-running hits today. Their musical influence and that of George Gershwin on the musical genre and on American music as a whole is undisputed. Jazz elements and swing also play an important role in the musicals. The Broadway musical is also associated with glamor, glitter and pure amusement. Broadway show business involved a large number of people, from lyricists to composers, performers and musicians, producers, directors, stage crew, costume, make-up and set designers and a plethora of journalists and critics who filled the gossip columns of the newspapers of the time. Broadway is an industry. In 1965, for example, there were 123 box offices for theater tickets, 33 companies that hosted theater parties, no fewer than 28 private theater schools and studios, around 200 theater agencies and some 340 producers. The production costs for a musical were enormous, comparable to today's film business, and only some of the productions managed to recoup their costs. Unusual experiments and plays that deviated from the conventional were ignored. Once the musicals had had a season on Broadway, they went on tour at home and abroad.
The city of New York is not only the center of the performances and the starting point of the success, but often also directly part of the content of the works. The audience's expectations were huge, not only from an artistic point of view, but also in terms of huge financial gain or total loss.

CONTRIBUTORS
Paula Luise Günther, soprano / Julia Andersson, mezzo-soprano / Coooper J. Kendall, tenor / Serguei L. Afonin, bass / Alexandre Dubach, violin / Christoph Zbinden, piano / Vokalensemble Musica Classica / Willi Derungs, conductor

INFO
www.musica-classica.ch

Further performances
Fri. May 16, 2025, 8 p.m., Ref. church Erlenbach im Simmental
Sun. May 18, 2025, 11 a.m. Mattinee, Johanneskirche Thun


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.