Registration is available to BC/CUID holders ONLY.

Please join the Harriman Institute and the Barnard Music Program for an event with Alexandra Birch and Jui-Ling Hsu.

Join violinist Alexandra Birch and pianist Jui-Ling Hsu in exploring classical music censored in the 20th century by authoritarian regimes. Under both Hitlerian racial edicts and Stalinist aesthetic strictures on the arts, composers with a typically “Romantic” and tonal compositional style were paradoxically censored alongside their modernist counterparts. In the Third Reich, the “Romanticism of Steel” championed by propaganda minister Goebbels leaned on Teutonic mythology and excluded composers of Jewish origin including Felix Mendelssohn from the 1800s and contemporary virtuosos like Erich Wolfgang Korngold. In the Soviet context, denunciations under Andrei Zhdanov in the 1940s also included composers like Nikolay Myaskovsky who otherwise was well-respected and whose symphonies were hailed as a Soviet continuation of great Russian orchestral writing. These composers together: Korngold’s “Marietta’s Lied” arranged for violin and piano, Myaskovsky’s tremendous sonata for Violin and Piano, and Felix Mendelssohn’s d minor Piano Trio give us insight into the “Censored Romantic” under 20th century authoritarianism.