BBC Concert Orchestra: Weill, Hindemith, Schoenberg at Queen Elizabeth Hall

Schoenberg would never play second fiddle to a film producer or director, so instead of composing music for the pre-produced film he concentrated on key words of the commissioning brief - 'danger, fear and catastrophe'. The result was film music without the film, programmatic music without the story. If Schoenberg remained aloft for the purity of his art, Weill's heroine Anna in 'Seven Deadly Sins' is exactly the opposite. She travels around America, succumbing to different sins to achieve her financial goals. Brecht's libretto suggests that capitalism is the greatest sin of all. Hindemith draws parallels between the oppression of peasants shown in Grunewald's paintings, and the political turmoil of his own times. 'Mathis der Maler' was premiered in 1934, the year after Weill left Germany for writing 'degenerate' music. Kurt Weill: The Seven Deadly Sins, Interval; Paul Hindemith: Symphony, Mathis der Maler; Arnold Schoenberg: Accompaniment to a Film Scene, Op.34.