Banned Music June 6, 2009

Las Cruces, NM – The Las Cruces Friends of Chamber Music will present a free concert at 3:00 p.m. Saturday, June 6, 2009 at the Branigan Cultural Center. The concert will be held in the gallery where the traveling exhibit “Fighting the Fires of Hate” is displayed. Works by Max Bruch and Kurt Weill, whose works were banned in Nazi Germany, will be featured.

In 1880 Max Bruch composed several pieces for the Jewish Community in Liverpool. The music became so popular that it was generally, though erroneously, assumed that Bruch, a Lutheran, was of Jewish descent. The Nazis lumped Bruch among a host of "racially impure" composers. Eight Pieces for clarinet, viola and piano by Max Bruch will be performed by John Pleasant (clarinet), Nancy Morie (viola) and Barbara Toth (piano).

Kurt Julian Weill, the son of a cantor, was a German composer known for his collaborations with writer Bertolt Brecht. The Weill-Brecht collaboration produced a new type of opera using wit to address social follies of their time. Their work was labeled as “degenerate” music and banned in Nazi Germany. Selections from the "Three Penny Opera" will be performed by soprano, Irene Brink with Barbara Toth at the piano.

The arts suffered an incalculable loss as a result of the systematic removal of an entire generation of writers, composers and performers by means of censorship or extermination by the Third Reich. “Fighting the Fires of Hate,” a nationally touring traveling exhibit from the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum examines the suppression of freedom of expression. The exhibit remains on display at the Cultural Center through July 18th.

The concert is free, but space is limited to 100 guests. Doors will open at 2:30 p.m. The Branigan Cultural Center, 501 N. Main Street, is located at the north end of the Downtown Mall in Las Cruces. The exhibit is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. For more information, contact the Branigan Cultural Center at (575) 541-2154 or visit the Center’s web site at www.las-cruces.org/museums