- Kurt Weill
Symphony No. 2 (1934)
(Fantaisie Symphonique)- Heugel (World excluding Germany, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland, Eastern Europe and British Empire except Canada)
Critical Edition edited by James Holmes
- 2222/2220/timp.perc/str
- 25 min
- 22nd February 2025, Clay Center, Charleston, WV, United States of America
- 2nd March 2025, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE, United States of America
Programme Note
Yannick Nézet-Séguin discusses programming Weill's Symphony No. 2 on a Philadelphia Orchestra concert:
Kurt Weill composed Symphony No. 2 in1933-34 on a commission from the Princesse de Polignac (Winnaretta Singer, an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune and an arts patron). The Concertgebouw premiered it in Amsterdam in October 1934 under the baton of Bruno Walter. Walter gave the US premiere with the New York Philharmonic in two months later. The symphony has become a familiar face in the twentieth-century symphonic line-up.
In 2000, David Schiff remarked in Atlantic Monthly that it "sums up the musical revolution that Weill had begun as an enfant terrible in the mid-twenties."
The symphony is in three movements: Sostenuto - Allegro molto; Largo; Allegro vivace - Presto.
Additional information at the Kurt Weill Foundation
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- Wise Music at Carnegie Hall’s Weimar Republic Festival
- 17th January 2024
- The centerpiece of Carnegie Hall’s 2024 season is Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, a festival that explores one of the most complex and consequential chapters in modern human history.