"Two Pianos - Playing for Life" Project
A 'concert documentary' series about the power of music to preserve personal space under oppression.
About
The Two Pianos Project revives the life and times of a 20th century Jewish family whose artistic talents and determination – plus the power of music to transcend language, ethnic and other boundaries – propelled them to surmount those obstacles in search of better lives. Their resilience in the face of state-sponsored violence echoes today’s world of displaced refugees. Current events reinforce this theme: our concert documentary’s acclaimed pianists, Diana Shapiro and Stanislava Varshavsky, grew up in Moscow and Kharkov (Kharkiv) Ukraine respectively, before their 1980s flights to freedom.
The Project began with the Philadelphia premiere of Two Pianos: Playing for Life (2018), a multi-media ‘concert documentary’ with pop-up exhibit featuring classical music on two grand pianos plus background readings/narration by descendants of the tale’s main characters. It traces two young married Jewish pianists -- Anna Burstein (Romania) and Halina Neuman (Poland) – who met as “alien resident” students at the Leipzig Conservatory in the 1920s and concertized before segregated all-Jewish audiences in the 1930s through the Judisher Kulturbund [Jewish Culture Association] – Jews’ only access to culture after Hitler banned them from public performances. The performance highlights music from concerts they gave under and after the Third Reich.
The Project began with the Philadelphia premiere of Two Pianos: Playing for Life (2018), a multi-media ‘concert documentary’ with pop-up exhibit featuring classical music on two grand pianos plus background readings/narration by descendants of the tale’s main characters. It traces two young married Jewish pianists -- Anna Burstein (Romania) and Halina Neuman (Poland) – who met as “alien resident” students at the Leipzig Conservatory in the 1920s and concertized before segregated all-Jewish audiences in the 1930s through the Judisher Kulturbund [Jewish Culture Association] – Jews’ only access to culture after Hitler banned them from public performances. The performance highlights music from concerts they gave under and after the Third Reich.
After the Premiere its organizers formed Papers Please Inc., a nonprofit arts/education company, to bring Two Pianos’ tale of musical resistance to a wider audience. Live performances/exhibits tailored to specific sites followed at Leipzig Germany (June 2019) and Rutgers University/Newark NJ (Oct. 2019), important stations in Anna and Halina’s lives. A May 2022 Two Pianos open-air performance at Untermyer Gardens (Yonkers NY) will incorporate Samuel Untermyer’s 1933 call for a global boycott of Nazi Germany in our story.
In 2020 we expanded the reach of the Project’s live performances through a new website (www.twopianosplayingforlife.org), YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRMTSAbp4j2Z4o1EeNxTcsg), and literary nonfiction oral-history books. In 2021 we published A Border Town in Poland, the memoir of Anna’s husband Hirsch Bieler. A 2nd volume, Firebird: The Musical Life and Times of Rebecca Burstein-Arber, will be released May 2022. The authors will be 2022/23 Jewish Book Council Network authors on that national speaker circuit.
Learn More: http://www.twopianosplayingforlife.org