To All We Stretch the Open Arm | ||||
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Studio album by | ||||
Released | 2004 | |||
Recorded | Seattle, Washington, January 2003 | |||
Genre | Indie rock | |||
Length | 38:09 | |||
Label | Yoyo Records | |||
Producer | Pat Maley, Ed Varga | |||
Mirah chronology | ||||
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To All We Stretch the Open Arm is a collection of political songs by a variety of songwriters, performed by Mirah and the Black Cat Orchestra. It met with a positive review in Allmusic and mixed review from Pitchfork.
The album was produced by Pat Maley and Ed Varga, and recorded in early 2003 in Seattle, Washington. Mirah and the orchestra cover songs by artists such as Fausto Amodei, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Kurt Weill, Bertholt Brecht, Horacio Guarany, and Stephen Foster, and also cover several original songs by Mirah as well. It was released on Yoyo Records in 2004. [1]
Review scores | |
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Source | Rating |
Allmusic | [1] |
Pitchfork | 5.2/10 [2] |
It met with a positive review in Allmusic [1] and mixed review from Pitchfork. [2] According to Allmusic, "While the album certainly addresses war and oppression with an appropriately somber tone (especially on Cohen's "Story of Isaac" and the sweetly earnest reading of Foster's "Hard Times"), To All We Stretch the Open Arm doesn't lose sight of how important passion and wit are to any good protest." [1]
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 on August 27, 1943.
"Mack the Knife" or "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" is a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their 1928 music drama The Threepenny Opera. The song tells of a knife-wielding criminal of the London underworld from the musical named Macheath, the "Mack the Knife" of the title.
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Mirah is an American musician and songwriter based in Brooklyn, New York. After getting her start in the music scene of Olympia, Washington, in the late 1990s, she released a number of well-received solo albums on K Records, including You Think It's Like This but Really It's Like This (2000) and Advisory Committee (2002). Her 2009 album (a)spera peaked on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart at #46, while her 2011 collaborative album Thao + Mirah peaked at #7.
Paul Eliot Green was an American playwright whose work includes historical dramas of life in North Carolina during the first decades of the twentieth century. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1927 play, In Abraham's Bosom, which was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1926-1927.
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Sinatra: Vegas is a 2006 box set of live performances by the American singer Frank Sinatra, recorded in Las Vegas.
The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent is a Lehrstück by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, written in collaboration with Slatan Dudow and Elisabeth Hauptmann. Under the title Lehrstück it was first performed, with music by Paul Hindemith, as part of the Baden-Baden festival on 28 July 1929, at the Stadthalle, Baden-Baden, directed by Brecht, designed by Heinz Porep.
The Flight across the Ocean is a Lehrstück by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, inspired by We, Charles Lindbergh's 1927 account of his transatlantic flight in the plane Spirit of St. Louis. Written for the Baden-Baden Music Festival, it was originally entitled Lindbergh's Flight and premiered in 1929 with music by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith in a broadcast by the Frankfurter Rundfunk-Symphonie-Orchester under the direction of Hermann Scherchen and produced by Ernst Hardt.
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Lori Goldston is an American cellist and composer. Accomplished in a wide variety of styles, including classical, world music, rock and free improvisation, she came to prominence as the touring cellist for Nirvana from 1993–1994 and appears on their live album MTV Unplugged in New York. She was a member of Earth, the Black Cat Orchestra, and Spectratone International, and also performs solo.
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas was a Brazilian lawyer and politician who served as the 14th and 17th president of Brazil, from 1930 to 1945 and from 1951 to 1954, respectively. Due to his long and controversial tenure as Brazil's provisional, constitutional, and dictatorial leader, he is considered by historians as the most influential Brazilian politician of the 20th century.
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt 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 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.
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That's All is an album by American singer Bobby Darin released in 1959 and arranged by Richard Wess. It was on the Billboard LP charts for 52 weeks and peaked at number seven. It also includes Darin's US No. 1 hit "Mack the Knife", which spent nine weeks at the top spot, and "Beyond the Sea", which was a Top 10 hit. At the second Grammy Awards, Darin won Record of the Year and Best New Singer.
Black Cat Orchestra was a musical group formed in Seattle, Washington, active from 1991 to 2004. It consisted, in various forms over the years, of Lori Goldston (cello), Kyle Hanson (accordion), Don Crevie (horn), Scott Granlund (saxophone), Russ Meltzer (guitar), Jason Munger and Jeff Teitelbaum (bass), Matthew Sperry, Detonator Beth, Gina Sala and Jessika Kenney (vocals), Emily Marsh and Joseph Zajonc (drums), Jack Magai (percussion), and Friese Undine (harmonica). The band released two albums, as well as a collaboration with Mirah, To All We Stretch the Open Arm, and appeared on the David Byrne album Feelings.