Trip the light fantastic from Berlin to Hollywood as Signum Saxophone Quartet team-up with renegade Australian opera star and cabaret queen Ali McGregor for a seven-city national tour this May.
The Hollywood Songbook opens in Canberra on Saturday 3 May, before visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Sydney and Newcastle, and concluding in Perth on Saturday 17 May.
Melbourne audiences will be able to experience it at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Tuesday 6 May.
Musica Viva Australia is delighted to welcome back the Berlin-based quartet for the first time since their critically-acclaimed debut tour of Australia in 2022.
“This beautiful collaboration is a nod to the transformational impact of immigrants on the culture of their adopted homes,” says Artistic Director Paul Kildea.
“Hanns Eisler wrote his Hollywood Songbook holed up in Los Angeles in the early 1940s; a lucky émigré escaping the dark clouds over Europe. In our 80th year, Eisler’s title is a peg for a celebration of Musica Viva Australia’s founders and their impact on Australian culture.”
Signum Saxophone Quartet debuted at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2013 and were named as Rising Stars of the European Concert Hall Organisation a year later. Their albums, Echoes (Deutsche Grammophon) and Chameleon (Berlin Classics) give a taste of their eclectic repertoire which ranges from Bach to Broadway classics. For their Australian debut in 2022 critics noted their ‘irrepressible energy’ (The Age) and declared ‘their playing and artistry is revelatory’ (Barefoot Review).
For their return, the quartet are joined by Australian opera star and Helpmann Award-winning cabaret performer Ali McGregor. A former principal soprano with Opera Australia turned circus runaway, McGregor has performed everywhere from Glastonbury to Carnegie Hall. In 2023, she made her solo debut with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performing a sold- out show in Hamer Hall.
Together McGregor and the Signums explore the turbulent first half of the 20th century through the voices of some of the artists who lived through these transformative years. Their program celebrates the impact of European émigrés like Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, composer of the Hollywood Songbook, alongside the brash energy of American composers Aaron Copland, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Cole Porter and Harold Arlen.
Tickets are available now on Musica Viva Australia’s website.
