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ARTIST
TITLE
Cultural Death: Music under Tyranny
FORMAT
CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
ARB 162CD ARB 162CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
10/16/2015

Three musical giants are heard keeping music alive under dictatorships: Oswald Kabasta & the Munich Philharmonic (1942-44); Alfred Hoehn & the Leipzig Radio Orchestra (1940); Oskar Fried & the USSR State Symphony Orchestra (1937-38). Oswald Kabasta's Germany prohibited degenerate music, a Nazi ban he occasionally flaunted. However, when the Nazis were defeated and Kabasta lost his post, he opted for suicide. Alfred Hoehn, always described as a poet of the piano, witnessed Germany's descent into madness and suffered a stroke which paralyzed him during a performance. His Brahms radio disc was stolen from Berlin Radio by the Russian Army, returned forty years later under perestroika. Most conductors are egomaniacs but Oskar Fried (pictured on the cover) deliberately hid his life's actions as he may have been a Russian spy. He identified with Berlioz and his violent reading was taken off a Russian film soundtrack leaked to Sweden. When Hitler took power, Fried escaped from Berlin to Moscow, where he may have been murdered in 1941 during the week when Germany and Russia became enemies.