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Kate Westbrook (born 18 September 1939) [1] is an English painter and musician. Her musical work centres on her career as a vocalist, predominantly with the bands of her husband, British composer and bandleader Mike Westbrook. She also works extensively as librettist and doubles as instrumentalist (tenor horn and piccolo).
Kate Westbrook (née Bernard) was born in Guildford, Surrey, England, [1] and grew up in the U.S. and Canada, before going to Dartington Hall School (which later became Dartington College of Arts) in Devon, England. From there she went to Bath Academy of Art at Corsham and then to Reading University. Later she lived and worked on the East and West coasts of America. After travelling in Mexico she returned to England and took up a part-time teaching post at Leeds College of Art. Westbrook's musical career began in 1974, when she joined the Mike Westbrook Brass Band, [1] and gave up teaching to concentrate on the dual career of painter and musician. She has worked in theatre, radio, and television.
As an instrumentalist she plays tenor horn and piccolo, however her work centres on vocals both as singer and librettist. [1] Westbrook's wide vocal range embraces jazz, music theatre (she sang the role of Anna in Bertolt Brecht's The Seven Deadly Sins with the London Symphony Orchestra), contemporary music (pieces by Frederic Rzewski, Philip Clark), opera (Gioacchino Rossini) and music hall. She has performed all over Europe and as far afield as the Far East and North America. Her work as lyricist has encompassed everything from cabaret songs to opera. In collaboration with her husband, Mike Westbrook, she has generated a whole series of jazz/cabarets and music-theatre pieces. She adapts and sings texts in several languages (English, German, French, Italian on a regular basis - several others when the occasion arises). Other than her own lyrics and music, her repertoire includes works by William Blake, Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill, Cole Porter, Friedrich Hollaender, Federico García Lorca, Paul Éluard, Edward Lear, Wilhelm Busch, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and The Beatles. Other musical collaborations feature among others Phil Minton, Lindsay Cooper and The Orckestra (Henry Cow, the Mike Westbrook Brass Band and Frankie Armstrong).
Westbrook studied fine art at Dartington Hall School (which later became Dartington College of Arts) in Devon, Bath Academy of Art at Corsham and Reading University. The first one-man show of her paintings was held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, in 1963. She continues to exhibit her work in solo and group shows in Britain and abroad. Her work is in public and private collections. Many musical Westbrook projects, such as Art Wolf and Turner In Uri, have been inspired by the visual arts.
With Mike Westbrook
The Threepenny Opera is a German "play with music" by Bertolt Brecht, adapted from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay's 18th-century English ballad opera, The Beggar's Opera, and four ballads by François Villon, with music by Kurt Weill. Although there is debate as to how much, if any, contribution Hauptmann might have made to the text, Brecht is usually listed as sole author.
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall and a number of works on Jewish themes. He became a United States citizen in 1943.
Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, was an American composer, lyricist, and librettist. He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by the Works Progress Administration. He is known for The Cradle Will Rock and for his off-Broadway translation/adaptation of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His works also include the opera Regina, an adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes; the Broadway musical Juno, based on Seán O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock; and No for an Answer. He completed translation/adaptations of Brecht's and Weill's musical play Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and of Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children with music by Paul Dessau. Blitzstein also composed music for films, such as Surf and Seaweed (1931) and The Spanish Earth (1937), and he contributed two songs to the original 1960 production of Hellman's play Toys in the Attic.
Benjamin Franklin Wedekind was a German playwright. His work, which often criticizes bourgeois attitudes, is considered to anticipate expressionism and was influential in the development of epic theatre.
Dagmar Krause is a German singer, best known for her work with avant-rock groups including Slapp Happy, Henry Cow, and Art Bears. She is also noted for her coverage of songs by Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler. Her unusual singing style makes her voice instantly recognisable and has defined the sound of many of the bands with whom she has worked.
Lindsay Cooper was an English bassoon and oboe player and composer. Best known for her work with the band Henry Cow, she was also a member of Comus, National Health, News from Babel and David Thomas and the Pedestrians. She collaborated with a number of musicians, including Chris Cutler and Sally Potter, and co-founded the Feminist Improvising Group. She wrote scores for film and TV and a song cycle Oh Moscow which was performed live around the world in 1987. She also recorded a number of solo albums, including Rags (1980), The Gold Diggers (1983), and Music For Other Occasions (1986).
Michael John David Westbrook is an English jazz pianist, composer, and writer of orchestrated jazz pieces. He is married to the vocalist, librettist and painter Kate Westbrook.
Paul Dessau was a German composer and conductor. He collaborated with Bertolt Brecht and composed incidental music for his plays, and several operas based on them.
Will Holt was an American singer, songwriter, librettist and lyricist. He was known first and primarily as a folk performer during the 1950s, when he made early and influential recordings of such songs as "Sinner Man" and "Lemon Tree", for which he wrote the English lyrics. He later became known as an interpreter of the music of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, and made significant contributions to Broadway theatre during the 1970s.
Saint Joan of the Stockyards is a play written by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht between 1929 and 1931, after the success of his musical The Threepenny Opera and during the period of his radical experimental work with the Lehrstücke. It is based on the musical that he co-authored with Elisabeth Hauptmann, Happy End (1929). In this version of the story of Joan of Arc, Brecht transforms her into "Joan Dark", a member of the "Black Straw Hats" in 20th-century Chicago. The play charts Joan's battle with Pierpont Mauler, the unctuous owner of a meat-packing plant. Like her namesake, Joan is a doomed woman, a martyr and an innocent in a world of strike-breakers, fat cats, and penniless workers. Like many of Brecht's plays it is laced with humor and songs as part of its epic dramaturgical structure and deals with the theme of emancipation from material suffering and exploitation.
Carola Neher was a German actress and singer.
Grimeborn is an annual East London musical theatre and opera festival which coincides with the world famous East Sussex Glyndebourne Opera Festival. Founded by Arcola Theatre's artistic director Mehmet Ergen in 2007, the festival is held at Arcola Theatre in Dalston, East London. It takes place in and around August, and tends to showcase new and experimental works alongside radical productions of classic opera, using both the Arcola's performing stages.
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt.
Vita Mavrič is a Slovene chansonnier.
Richard Williams is an English theatre director, producer and teacher working mainly in the areas of dramatic and lyric presentation. Richard Williams' career has concerned classics, new plays, music theatre and opera productions. In a directing career lasting some 35 years he has directed more than 250 productions.
Franz Servatius Bruinier was a pianist and composer. He was the first professional composer to collaborate with Bertolt Brecht. On account of his early death from tuberculosis, and because the results of his work went unpublished or were published only without attribution in respect of the musical score, his contribution went unrecognised by mainstream Brecht scholarship till the mid 1970s.
Westbrook-Rossini is an album by Mike Westbrook, featuring interpretations of works by Gioachino Rossini which was recorded in Switzerland in 1986 and first released on the hat ART label the following year.
Westbrook-Rossini, Zürich Live 1986 is a live album by Mike Westbrook, featuring interpretations of works by Gioachino Rossini which was recorded in Switzerland in 1986 and first released on the hat ART label in 1996.
Kate Kühl was a German cabaret performer, chanteuse and film actor. After 1933 her brand of political cabaret was no longer permitted and she found herself subject of a Berufsverbot : she left Berlin and supported herself as a regional (unnamed) radio announcer. She was able to return to the stage after 1945, however.
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