Degenerate Art
Full Ensemble
Throughout history, art has maintained the power to threaten the social order. Delving into music that was censored, banned, and propagandized as “degenerate,” Fifth House Ensemble sheds new light on works by artists facing oppression under oppressive regimes from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia. Fifth House Ensemble collaborates with the American Civil Liberties Union, Holocaust Community Services, Spertus Institute, Artists at Risk, Unsilence, the Guild Literary Complex, the University of Chicago, and street art collective CMK to share and illuminate poignant historical and present day stories of artists from around the world. New interviews and documentary-style tales from history interact with graffiti painting set to music written in concentration camps and in defiance of powerful regimes.
Program
Dmitri Shostakovich — Four Waltzes for flute, clarinet, piano
Erwin Schulhoff — 6 Esquisses de jazz, selected movements
Harold Arlen, arr. Evan Snyder — Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Ernst Toch — Quartet for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and viola, Op. 98
Gustav Mahler, arr. Cliff Colnot — Adagietto from Symphony No. 5
Olivier Messiaen — Quatuor pour la fin du temps, selected movements
Frederic Rzewski — Les Moutons de Panurge