Masha Qrella

“ In October 2007, Masha Qrella was asked by Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) to put together an evening’s performance as part of the “New York–Berlin” celebrations to mark the venue’s 50th anniversary. Under the heading “Broadway - Cradle of Popular Music”, the challenge was to work with and find new approaches to the compositions of Kurt Weill and Frederick Loewe. We asked Detlef Diederichsen, the curator of the series of events, to write liner notes for the upcoming release of recordings of new interpretations of Broadway classics. Here is an excerpt:
“[...] Imagine what it would be like to find the common denominator between Berlin and Broadway by having a contemporary Berlin artist do fresh interpretations in his/her own style of the work of these two giants of Broadway who had their origins in Berlin, and by having that artist work just as creatively and freely within the rules and parameters of musicals as Weill and Loewe did a full half a century ago. The songs of Weill and Loewe were examined to see how relevant they were fifty years on and to what extent they could be integrated into today’s pop world, or whether they would be no better than ballroom nostalgia or banal TV ‘variety spectacular’ material. I wanted to choose a Berlin artist to work on this project who you wouldn’t really expect to be involved in something like this – I didn’t simply want to choose someone from the neo-swing scene, for example. Instead, I wanted someone who would have to get to grips with these compositions for the first time because they actually came from a totally different musical genre, from one of the many pop niche scenes around today. However, I still wanted someone who wrote songs themselves and who would thus be able to judge Weill and Loewe’s output for themselves. I wanted someone who had the technical ability to take on these songs which are sometimes quite sophisticated, particularly compared to today’s indie-pop songs.”
In contrast to the two previous albums, this time around the pieces were arranged for a band and then recorded live in studio over a period of four days.

Links
www.mashaqrella.de/
www.morrmusic.com