Ensemble Modern Media release a new album featuring works by Paul Hindemith, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill, performed by Ensemble Modern, mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta and the vocal ensemble amarcord under the direction of HK Gruber. All pieces were recorded live at the Cologne’s Philharmonie in 2025.

Ensemble Modern’s close connection to the music of Kurt Weill and the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music has led to numerous performances and recordings, including landmark interpretations of works such as The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny Songspiel and Chansons des Quais – all under the direction of HK Gruber, recipient of the Weill Foundation’s Lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award.

In 2024, the Foundation enabled the Ensemble to tour the USA, performing at Carnegie Hall in New York and other venues. The programme featured works by Paul Hindemith, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill – composers who were forced into exile after the National Socialists came to power in 1933. These works reflect the tensions between artistic awakening and political upheaval – a time of creative liberation, social upheaval and musical extremes.

The album ‘Dancing on a Volcano’, released by Ensemble Modern Media, brings together these pieces in a new recording from the Cologne Philharmonie featuring HK Gruber, mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta and the vocal ensemble amarcord. Hindemith’s Chamber Music no.1 (1922) is full of irony and parodic energy, as well as provocative musical gestures. It is no coincidence that he was regarded as the ‘bad boy’ of new music. Korngold’s suite from the incidental music to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1918–1920) captures the lightness of the Viennese Bohème. Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Film Scene (1930) seems to foreshadow the darkening world of the interwar period. In the ensemble version for 15 players by Christian Muthspiel and HK Gruber of Weill’s sung ballet The Seven Deadly Sins (1933), musical wit intertwines with multi-layered social critique.