Recently Performed at:
- Archiduc Café, Brussels, BE on Sunday October 2nd, 2016
- Norfolk and Norwich Chamber Music Series, Norwich, UK on July 31st, 2016
- Quatre Mains Klaviercentrum, Gent, BE on Sunday May 1st, 2016
- Bassenheimer Hof, Rüdesheim, DE on April 9th, 2016
© Stelios Makrydakis
From Berlin Cabaret to Broadway: a stylish programme of music that ranges from the 1920s Berlin Cabaret of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill to 1960s Broadway hits made famous by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli. In between, there are lush jazz ballads sung previously by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. This international programme is performed in German, French and English.
Proud of being difficult to classify, ‘Somewhere in Between’ is a story of what happens in the buffer zone: in those ‘in between’ areas that make life interesting.
Kurt and the Sophisticated Lady experiment with music whose sweetness contrasts – sometimes brutally – with the sharpness of the lyrics. (Just think of Kurt Weill’s ‘Mack the Knife’ with its fun, swinging, jazzy music and the words that are as hard as steel.)
Although many songs from the 1930s and 40s are sugar sweet and sentimental, we concentrate on the pithier stuff – music that was formed by the context in which it was created. How does it affect your art when you live in dangerous and unsettled times? For me, the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and the resultant level 4 lock-down in Brussels have made me think again about what it must have been like to be a Jewish composer in Nazi Germany. How do you combine the rawness of war, repression and fear with your everyday life? Do you carry on ‘counting angels on a pinhead’ in times of collective grief? What is the artistic result?
Our short promotional video will give you an idea of what we’re about. The pain and the pleasure, including the subtexts and under-the-surface meanings. What is shown? What is not?
A woman between ages, and between men. A love between excitement and destruction. Somewhere between sweetness and sadness. Somewhere between classical and jazz.
And here’s Andrew in action:
