Poster for an event titled "Songs of Protest and Exile: A Recital of Resistance and Remembrance," featuring artwork of a woman singing with a dove holding an olive branch, a chain, and signs pointing to cities like Paris, Berlin, New York, and Moscow, with text in multiple languages about exiles, protests, and voices that refused silence.

Songs of Protest and Exile.

Music written in times when speaking freely was impossible

Throughout history, artists have found ways to resist oppression, bear witness to injustice, and preserve their humanity when exile, censorship and persecution threatened to snuff their voices out forever.

Songs of Protest and Exile brings together works by Hans Eisler, Kurt Weill, Stefan Wolpe, Dmitri Schostakovich and the contemporary Russo-Ukrainian composer Dmitri Kapyrin in a recital that explores what happens when music and poetry become an act of conscientious objection. Hans Eisler and Bertold Brecht and Ignazio Silone write with sarcasm, anger and tenderness while living in exile. Stefan Wolpe and Vladimir Maiakowski call upon artists to resist tyranny by transforming art from a self-serving form of entertainment into the primary engine of progress and liberation. Dmitri Schostakovich and Marina Tsvetaeva reveal quiet acts of defiance beneath official Soviet culture.

I have created an evening that is historically grounded, emotionally immediate and surprisingly relevant.

So far, Songs of Protest and Exile were performed in DK Rassvet (Moscow, Russia), Marburg Synagogue (Marburg, Germany) and Galerie Chroma (Ottignies, Belgium), with each performance shaped by its audience and historical context. I welcome invitations from festivals, museums, galleries, synagogues, churches, Holocaust remembrance events, human rights and cultural organisations seeking programmes that connect music with history, memory and civic dialogue.

Hans Eisler, “Ballade vom Nigger Jim” with Anait Karpova at Gallerie Chroma, Ottignies