As part of their Soundings series, the Nasher Sculpture Center will present Music from Yellow Barn: Music on the Brink of War.

Since its premiere in 1912, Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire has been regarded by generations of musicians and audiences as an icon of artistic originality. Igor Stravinsky, who knew something of originality, referred to Pierrot as the “solar plexus of twentieth century music." Both Schoenberg and Kurt Weill (with dramatist Bertolt Brecht, of course), whose Threepenny Opera, Mahogany, and Happy Days appeared alongside the first stirrings of the Second World War, found the cabaret to be an environment conducive to blurred lines separating art and popular music, and the socialist and capitalist worlds to which their music reacted.

Soundings presents an evening devoted to Pierrot Lunaire, with soprano Lucy Shelton and songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, with actors Walter van Dyk and Liza Sadovy.