Andrea Katz
Pianist Andrea Katz partners soprano Merlyn Quaife in song that refuses to look away: protest anthems, camp cabaret, art-song elegies and new Australian cycles, shaped with warmth, irony and unflinching clarity at the keyboard.
On Lest We Forget she anchors a hard-hitting sequence that moves from ghetto lullabies and Strange Fruit to Duparc, Poulenc, Weill and brittle Terezin cabaret, then out toward hope. The playing matches the texts: forceful colour beside moments of real stillness, never smoothing the bitter edges. She also wrote the programme notes that fix each song’s moral weight. Elsewhere she is the piano half of Roger Heagney’s Fortune My Foe, setting Graeme Ellis with the same singer, and of Schumann’s Liederkreis Op. 39: intimate, responsive chamber work rather than display. Across these discs Katz is the steady, eloquent partner who lets the voice carry the argument while the piano holds the room.
Andrea Katz is featured on the following titles
Lest We Forget: A Manifest of Struggle and Hope
Welcome to the world’s first “classical” protest CD. The music ranges widely across Germany, France, England, Austria, Poland, Chile, the USA and Australia, touching world wars, the Holocaust, dictatorships and the stolen generation. It is a no-holds-barred plea for humanity to recover humanitarian values before it is too late.
Credit: Liner Notes