Villa Aurora Events Archive

October 2013

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Romanticism Renewed

Los Angeles

The Karl Weigl Foundation and Villa Aurora present:

Romanticism Renewed: Discover the “forgotten” Karl Weigl 
featuring John McLaughlin Williams, violin and Glen Inanga, piano.
 
In his early years Karl Weigl (1881 – 1949) was centrally connected to the early twentieth-century Viennese avant-garde. He had been a student of Alexander Zemlinsky and was a lifelong friend of Arnold Schoenberg. In 1904 the three founded the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler (Society of Creative Sound Artists), with Mahler the honorary president. In 1938, Weigl was forced to flee to New York, where he struggled to make a living for his family, but despite the difficulties of exile and his full teaching schedule he never stopped composing.
 
Performances of his music during the last ten years of his life were almost exclusively confined to his songs and chamber music. Weigl did not live to experience his posthumous acclaim in 1968 when Stokowski gave the world premiere of his Symphony No. 5. Weigl’s works were performed by such musicians as Wilhelm Furtwängler, George Szell, and Elisabeth Schumann.

John McLaughlin Williams is a Grammy Award-winning conductor and violinist known for his relentless research into musical diamonds hidden from view.
Glen Inanga is best known for his award-winning work in the Micallef-Inanga Piano Duo, which has appeared with, among others, the BBC Philharmonic and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.
 
Williams and Inanga will record the works for violin and piano, none of which are presently commercially available, for the Sonos Luminos label.

This concert is endorsed by the OREL Foundation, which was founded by Los Angeles Opera Music Director James Conlon for the purpose of recovering creative voices that were lost to the musical repertory because they were suppressed for political and ideological reasons during the time of Hitler’s Germany and afterward.

We would like to thank the Austrian Consulate General for their support.

Tickets: $25 general, $15 friends of Villa Aurora can be purchased at: www.brownpaperticket.com


Location: Villa Aurora, 520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272
Street parking is available on Los Liones Drive. Shuttle service starts at 7 pm from Los Liones Drive, off Sunset Boulevard two blocks North-East of Pacific Coast Highway.
Please do not park on the Topanga State Park Lot!

Sunday, October 13, 2013

JazzIndeed meets North Atlantic Jazz Alliance

Berlin

Villa Aurora and the German Consulate General  present:
JazzIndeed meets North Atlantic Jazz Alliance
 
Join us for a jam session of the German jazz ensemble JAZZINDEED featuring internationally renown vocalist Michael Schiefel and the German-American NORTH ATLANTIC JAZZ ALLIANCE. Both ensembles were in the line-up at the European Jazz Festival at UCLA (October 10-13)
 
Based in Berlin, JazzIndeed is a contemporary jazz quintet that plays mainly original compositions and features the distinctive virtuoso voice of Michael Schiefel. In 2001, Schiefel became the youngest music professor in Germany when he joined the faculty of the Franz Liszt Conservatory in Weimar as a Professor of Vocal Jazz.
 
The North Atlantic Jazz Alliance (NAJA), a jazz collective comprised of three Germans and four Americans, has been seamlessly fusing jazz adaptations of classical pieces with touches of avant-garde compositions and funk-infused, straight-ahead rhythms.
 
Pianist Markus Burger and saxophonist Jan von Klewitz played to sold-out houses at the Villa before. Welcome back !
 
The concert at Villa Aurora is FREE OF CHARGE
RSVPs are required at 310.454.4231 
 
Location: Villa Aurora, 520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272
Street parking is available on Los Liones Drive. Shuttle service starts at 6 pm from Los Liones Drive, off Sunset Boulevard two blocks North-East of Pacific Coast Highway.
Please do not park on the Topanga State Park Lot!

Find all information about the Euro Jazz Festival at UCLA here.  

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Marta Feuchtwanger – An Emancipated Woman

Berlin

Marta Feuchtwanger – An Emancipated Woman

Marta Feuchtwanger, born Marta Löffler in 1891 in Munich, represented the undisputed center of gravitation in the exiled community of the forties in Los Angeles.
She and her husband, the writer Lion Feuchtwanger, opened their home, the Villa Aurora in the Pacific Palisades as a venue for gathering and intellectual exchange.
After her husband’s death, the Villa remained a societal center thanks to Marta Feuchtwanger. A collection of extensive correspondence is proof of her close friendship with many exiles in California.
In 1980 the University of Southern California (USC) awarded her an honorary doctorate. Marta Feuchtwanger remained poitically and culturally active until her death in 1987.

The event at Literaturhaus Berlin in honor of Marta Feuchtwanger is part of the 6th International Feuchtwanger Conference, held October 24 through 26 at the Jewish Museum Berlin.
It is part of a year-long program called “Destroyed Diversity” –an initiative by the Berlin Senate, commemorating the power grab by the National Socialists in 1933 and the November pogroms in 1938. The series deals with the National Socialists’ destruction of the diverse society in Berlin starting in 1933.

The program includes an interview Reinhart Hoffmeister did with Marta Feuchtwanger for ZDF and a talk by State Secretary Hella Dunger-Löper about Marta Feuchtwanger in Berlin. Finally a discussion between Journalist Marianne Heuwagen, who knew Marta Feuchtwanger personally and Alexandra Tyrolf, a researcher on “women in exile” will illustrate the life and impact of this exceptional woman.

Literaturhaus Berlin, Fasanenstraße 23, 10719 Berlin
Admission: 5.-/3.- EUR
 
For more information on the conference, click here.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Welcoming Reception

Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272)

 

 

Participants

Visual Artist | Nairy Baghramian

Nairy Baghramian was born in 1971 in Isfahan, Iran. She has lived and worked in Berlin since 1984.

Nairy Baghramian includes elements of furniture design, set design and fashion in her work. Her still lives in space involve references to material history, recontextualized and turned into political statements, pieces referring to literature and theatre.

Baghramian wishes to discover which topics of Early Modernism did not transmit to the new homeland of emigrated architects from Europe. Starting point is the construct of 'Home', a concept framing the burdens and chances of creative personalities who came to America voluntarily in the beginning of the 20th Century (like Neutra and Schindler) and those who where forced out of Europe.

Nairy's works were shown in Scottland, U.K., Germany, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and Italy.

Filmmaker | Jan-Ole Gerster

Jan-Ole Gerster was born in Hagen. He studied script writing and directing at the Berlin Film and Television Academy (DFFB). In 2010 Gerster started work on his graduation film 'Oh Boy!' with Tom Schilling in the lead role. The movie premiered at the 2012 Munich Filmfestival. 'Oh Boy!' garnered international acclaim and won the 2013 German Film Prize in six categories, among them for Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Film.
At Villa Aurora, Gerster will tackle his new project 'Cool Germania', a rise-and-fall story of two friends in the Berlin of the 90s and zeros.

At the Welcoming Reception, Gerster will show a scene from 'Oh Boy' and talk about his work.
Watch the trailer here.

'Oh Boy' has been nominated for the European Film Awards. Support Jan-Ole by voting here.

Writer | Volker Harry Altwasser

Volker Harry Altwasser, born in 1969 in Greifswald, is the recipient of the 2012 Italo-Svevo-Preis for his deap sea epos 'Letzte Fischer' ('Last Fishermen'). He was among the finalists for the Alfred Doeblin Award and the Ingeborg Bachmann Award.

Altwasser's thesis "literature about the ocean is always literature about failure - the ocean always prevails" links his works to American highlights of the genre, such as 'The Old Man and the Sea' or 'Moby Dick'. It took Altwasser 17 years to finish this novel, which shines with rigor, poetry and authenticity.

There will be a 20-minute reading of excerpts of the the novel (in German and English).

During his stay at Villa Aurora, the writer will trace the life story of writer Bruno Frank, a Feuchtwanger friend, who fell into oblivion.