Milton Community Concerts
at First Parish
Weill/Lenya: An Unusual Love Story
Saturday, November 23, 2019 at 7:00pm
Austrian-born soprano Ute Grerer presents “Weill/Lenya: An Unusual Love Story” to open this year’s season of Milton Community Concerts. The concert will take place in the historic Meetinghouse at First Parish of Milton, 535 Canton Avenue. She will be joined by pianist Timothy Steele.
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Recognized as one of the world’s leading interpreters of the music of Kurt Weill, Ms. Gfrerer will share the remarkable love story of this German composer and his wife Lotte Lenya, including the earliest days of their relationship, their immigration to America, and beyond, using pictures, quotes, music, and stories. Songs to be performed include “Mack the Knife”, “Pirate Jenny”, “Speak Low”, “Alabama Song”, “The Saga of Jenny”, and many more.
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Ute Gfrerer has been a successful international soloist for the past two decades. Her extensive repertory includes performances of opera, operetta, musicals, and recitals. She has sung with the Zurich Opera, Vienna Volksoper, and at venues including Barbican Hall in London, NHK Hall in Tokyo, and theaters in Salzburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich, and Guatemala. She has sung and recorded many works of Kurt Weill, including THE THREEPENNY OPERA, ONE TOUCH OF VENUS. LADY IN THE DARK, and THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS. She previously performed a Valentine’s Day Cabaret for Milton Community Concerts in 2016.
$20 general/$15 senior/Free for 18 and under
A native of Austria Soprano Ute Gfrerer studied voice and acting in Los Angeles before she started her international career singing operas, operettas and concerts in theaters all over the world, like the Vienna and the Zurich Opera, The Barbican Hall in London, The Megaron Theater in Athens, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Deutsches Theater Munich, NHK Hall in Tokyo, The Virginia Opera, and the Salzburg Music Festival to name but a few.
In the past decade she has become a specialist in the music of Kurt Weill, having sung and recorded many of his pieces. In 2018 Ute was asked to be the first person to sing and record a Weill song (The Song of the Blind Girl) that was lost since 1930 and then found in a library in Berlin 88 years later!This year she was also the judge of the prestigious “Lotte Lenya Voice Competition” at the Eastman School of Music.
Ute Gfrerer enjoys doing her own cabaret shows and collaborating with other artists, like visual artist Lisa Rosowsky which whom she created a very personal program around the topic of the Holocaust. www.forourfathers.com. She coaches young singers in artistic expression and has given masterclasses at the Vienna conservatory, Stanford University, the University of Maryland and NEC.
She was also nominated for an IRNE award as “Best Actress in a Musical” for her portrayal of Aldonza in the Musical “The Man of La Mancha”.
Ute lives on the Boston North Shore with her German husband Christoph, her 13 year old daughter Maxine and her singing dog Barolo.
For more information please visit her website:
Timothy Steele is an active vocal coach, collaborative pianist, and conductor, and has taught for twenty-six years on the opera faculty at New England Conservatory. He has conducted for outreach tours with the Boston Lyric Opera and is a former music director for Opera Providence. He has served as assistant conductor/pianist for over 180 productions with twenty-five opera companies, including Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, Wolf Trap Opera, Central City Opera, and PORT Opera. He assisted with the Pulitzer Prize winning opera MADAME WHITE SNAKE for productions in Boston and Taiwan and the OUROBOROS TRILOGY in 2016, and for three years collaborated with WaterFire-Providence on a unique and popular series of opera evenings. In Boston he has performed with Emmanuel Music, the Handel and Haydn Society, and the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, among others.