A production of Papers Please Inc.

TWO PIANOS       

                               playing for life

Anna Burstein Bieler and Halina Neuman Schulsinger, Grado Italy 1936
Two Pianos 2018-19 Performances Overview: Philadelphia, Leipzig, Newark
For individual performance highlight videos, please visit the Two Pianos YouTube

"In view of our present societal situation, not only in Germany but worldwide -- both the renewed growth of nationalism and right-wing radicalism but unfortunately also anti-Semitism -- it is of paramount importance that we take an unambiguous stand.  Our today's event is to show this stand."  

            -- Gisela Kallenbach, Event Sponsor (Director, Synagogue & Jewish Community of Leipzig;  former Member, E.U. Parliament),

June 2019 remarks introducing Two Pianos Leipzig events


TWO PIANOS:  PLAYING FOR LIFE

A multimedia Concert Documentary with Exhibit, Video and Print Materials
about human perseverance under oppression

The setting


Berlin, 1933: a group of dismissed Jews petitions for a separate organization that will allow suddenly-unemployed Jewish artists to perform for Jewish-only audiences.  The “Culture-League of German Jews” (Kulturbund Deutscher Juden) is approved by Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Enlightenment.  Dozens of Kulturbund chapters soon form, by 1935 becoming the sole public access to culture for Jews still in Germany.  Early members of its Leipzig branch include three young Jewish concert pianists and their music-loving businessman husbands.


A Concert Documentary


Two Pianos was developed with the Judische Kulturbund Project (Washington DC), which helped launch its June 2018 premiere at Philadelphia's Settlement Music School. Combining live classical music, narration and archival projections plus a companion exhibit and post-performance Q & A, it follows the friendship and careers of Jewish pianists Anna (Burstein) Bieler-Suwalski (1908-2003) and Halina (Neuman) Schulsinger (1908-1999), who like their friend Tanya (Zunser) Ury (1907-1988) played Leipzig Kulturbund concerts under the Third Reich.  Selections from those concerts are performed on two grand pianos by Stanislava Varshavski and Diana Shapiro, artists-in-exile whose stories echo the characters'.  A multimedia "Back Story" presentation-with-music about how Two Pianos came to be deepens these stories. 


Musical Odysseys


Two Pianos highlights its characters' tenacity, passion and devotion to craft. As talented student “alien residents” at Leipzig's famed Conservatory founded by Felix Mendelssohn, Anna, Halina and Tanya mastered new languages and cultures. As young Jewish mothers they advanced their professional piano careers while juggling child-care and Nazi restrictions. Their paths soon diverged through flight from Germany on one hand, and deportation, the Warsaw Ghetto and forced-labor camps on the other. They reconnected as naturalized American citizens, teachers and performers, remaining close friends for the rest of their long lives. 

 

2019-2022


June 2019: Two Pianos programs are part of Leipzig Germany's "Schalom Week," a city-sponsored week-long welcome for former Jewish residents and their descendants.  As in Philadelphia, the events are recorded, with a subsequent highlights video. The musical program expands.  The audience materials now include a German-language performance program and an illustrated 32-page German-language brochure that virtually replicates key parts of the 2018 Philadelphia exhibit, making it "portable" in a new way.. 


October 2019: The Institute of Jazz Studies (Rutgers University/Newark) sponsors our Concert Documentary. now featuring new audio/video clips, an English-language Exhibit brochure, and an expanded Exhibit. The full-length DVD includes post-performance Q and A. A new highlights video features the dark journey of Halina and her daughter Jola from their forced 1938 deportation from Leipzig, through the Warsaw Ghetto and labor/DP camps, to their eventual Newark homes. 


29 May 2022:  The first open-air and first post-COVID Two Pianos performance, at Untermyer Gardens (Yonkers NY) -- once called "the most beautiful garden in America" -- connects Rebecca's 1927 Beethoven performance at Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus with NY millionaire/Progressive reformer Samuel Untermyer's pledge of $100,000 for a permanent Mt. Scopus stage after that event. Untermyer uses the international radio dedication of this Minnie Untermyer Memorial Auditorium (April 1933) to call for a global boycott of Nazi Germany. Shortly afterwards Anna and Halina give their first Kulturbund concert (Leipzig 1934). Three new highlights videos capture various threads of this performance.  A new full-length DVD includes post-performance audience Q & A.


SUPPORT US

The Two Pianos Project is a "sponsored project" of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. This relationship allows Papers Please Inc., our umbrella arts/education company, to receive tax-deductible contributions for Project-related activities. Charitable contributions to the Two Pianos Project may be made by clicking this link.