Christmas Memories by Truman Capote with Jens Harzer

• Classical Music

Truman Capote tells touching and melancholy Christmas stories whose precisely drawn characters remain unforgettable. On the one hand, there is little Buddy, who bakes fruitcake with his old friend Sook every Christmas and finds out where he really belongs at another Christmas with his father, who is almost a stranger to him. Capote must have observed with a keen eye; what certainty or fantasy, what embellishment or dishonesty means; the mercilessness of his observations is, as always with this writer, only tempered by his skill and the clarity of his polished language.



The actor Jens Harzer reads Capote’s Christmas memoirs. His deep feeling for stories and narratives; his way of balancing sentiment and reason is brilliant. At major German-speaking theatres in Munich, Vienna, Berlin and Hamburg, among others, Harzer is the charismatic leader in his plays, underpinning his status as a subtly gigantic character actor. Oscillating seemingly effortlessly between his roles, he manages to throw everything into the balance and make each character his own. The current winner of the prestigious Iffland Ring, Jens Harzer, can now be seen in Hamburg, Hanover and Berlin with Capote’s Christmas Memories.

He will be accompanied musically by the renowned and award-winning musicians Ulf Schneider (violin) and Jan Philip Schulze (grand piano). The two have enjoyed a close artistic collaboration for many years; their preference for thematically orientated projects is particularly noteworthy. Naturally, they will accompany the evening with music from America, just like the stories themselves. She draws an arc from the wonderfully romantic musical language of Florence Price, the first African-American woman to become famous as a composer of classical music, to the energetic drive of John Adams, a star of »minimal music«. Not forgetting the jazz sounds of Gershwin and the opulent »Hollywood sound« of the exile Erich Korngold. Text and music illuminate each other and are lovingly harmonised.

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A production by Simone Henke :kunstgerecht

PERFORMERS

Jens Harzer narrator

Ulf Schneider violin

Jan Philip Schulze piano

PROGRAM

Christian Sinding
Abendlied

Joaquín Turina
La canción del lunar

Piotr I. Tschaikowsky
Sérénade mélancholique für Violine und Orchester h-Moll op. 26 / Andante

Truman Capote
»Weihnachtserinnerungen«

- Interval -

George Gershwin
Three Preludes

Erich Wolfgang Korngold
»Der Schneemann«

Truman Capote
Lesung Text »Weihnachten mit Vater«