Music faculty members earn rave in L.A. Times



Kristina Driskill
Kristina Driskill

Two adjunct faculty members from the Chapman Conservatory of Music — mezzo-soprano and vocal instructor Kristina Driskill and pianist and keyboard instructor Mark Robson — earned a rave review in the
Los Angeles Times’ CultureMonster blog
for their performance of the “Hollywood Songbook” of emigre German Jewish composer Hanns Eisler this past Saturday. 

They performed at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, which hosted a day-long event devoted to Eisler (1898-1962), who fled Germany, first to Moscow and then to the United States, when the Nazis banned his works.   After Eisler established himself as a composer in Los Angeles, two of his film scores,
Hangmen Also Die!
and
None But the Lonely Heart
, were nominated for Academy Awards.  His “Hollywood Songbook,” composed between 1938 and 1948, helped to cement Eisler’s reputation as one of the 20th century’s finest composers of
lieder
.  


man smiling
Mark Robson

Eisler was later caught up in the McCarthy-era blacklistings — he was accused of being the “Karl Marx of music” (he did compose for the Communist Party) and, although his friends Charlie Chaplin and Leonard Bernstein publicly supported him, he was deported from the U.S. in 1948.  He eventually settled in East Germany, where he continued to compose (among his works: the East German national anthem).  He died in 1962.

“A master of the swift stroke, (Eisler) could turn a tender song into a rant with a single acerbic note,” says the
L.A. Times’
 classical music critic, Mark Swed, in the review.  “Driskill, who recently appeared in Long Beach Opera’s
Cunning Little Vixen
, captured these mood swings with wonderfully angry, challenging, pouty, seductive, decadently dreamy expressivity.

“Great baritones — first Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and recently Matthias Goerne — have been these songs’  most important advocates. But Driskill found Medea-like theatrical subtleties they missed, while Robson hammered everything home on the piano brilliantly.   Were Driskill and Robson to add the remaining songs and find a strong director to stage them, they could be just the team we need to make the case for this curious but commanding composer.”

Dawn Bonker

Add comment

Your Header Sidebar area is currently empty. Hurry up and add some widgets.