Arnold - Beysens - Bos - Figuigui - De Cauter - Kuijken - Torfs

'Approximations/Contradictions' is the title of the first Web project by the Belgian artist Ana Torfs. It was recorded at deSingel, which co-produced this project, in summer 2004. This concert can be seen as a surprising epilogue to the Web project, and also as a tribute to the composer Hanns Eisler and one of his muses, the soprano Irmgard Arnold, who is now 86. The main item on the programme is 'Hollywood Songbook', collection of short but powerful songs the German-Austrian composer Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) wrote while in exile in the United States. Roughly half the lyrics were written by Bertolt Brecht. Eisler had already collaborated intensively with Brecht in Berlin before they both had to flee the violence of the Nazis in Germany in 1933. And indeed most of the lyrics are about war and exile. For this Web project, Torfs assembled a fascinating cast of twenty-one extremely varied singers and actors in front of the camera, each of whom gave an interpretation of one Brecht song from the 'Hollywood Songbook', accompanied by Piet Kuijken at the piano. Torfs filmed each performer in three different ways, whereby, among other things, she asks questions about 'acting', about the moment when a person becomes a character and starts to play a role. The result can best be described as 'minimal' or 'intimate' cinema. For this on-stage concert under the title 'Für Eisler', Ana Torfs and Piet Kuijken asked five performers from the Web project to each learn five songs from the 'Hollywood Songbook' under their instruction. The programme is supplemented by four songs Eisler wrote in Berlin in the turbulent thirties, here performed by Irmgard Arnold. Piet Kuijken will then play Sonata no. 3 for Piano (1943), which was written in the same period as the 'Hollywood Songbook'. Irmgard Arnold closes the evening with three rarely performed songs that Eisler composed in the mid-fifties, after returning to Berlin.