Tron Theatre to Present Maraike Bruening's SUMMER HEART

Tron Theatre presents MARAIKE BRUENING: SUMMER HEART, 8 & 9 September 2016, 7.45PM.

Maraike Bruening, who recently completed her studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, challenges the familiar recital experience with a hopeful, beautiful, multi-media insight into Alice Herz-Sommer's remarkable life and ethos, underscored by the live piano music of Chopin.

Life is beautiful was The Mantra of Alice Herz-Sommer, an exceptionally gifted pianist who, when she died in 2014 at the age of 110 was thought to be the oldest Holocaust survivor. After Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Alice suffered the miseries of the Prague ghetto, then in 1943 was sent to the Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration camp where nearly 35,000 prisoners perished, but where she gave over 150 concerts - 'music was special, like a spell'. Her husband was moved to Auschwitz and she never saw him again, and she lost many of her family and the friends she grew up with. Despite all this, Alice's positive outlook was an inspiration to all who encountered her, and she continued to practice piano each day for three hours, right up until her death.

Inspired and influenced by Herz-Sommer's belief that music had been a key factor in her survival, Bruening takes the Chopin Etudes, the pieces Alice threw herself into practicing when the Nazis invaded her homeland, and uses them, alongside projections and drama, to tell Alice's story. Directed by Fiona Mackinnon, Summer Heart is an homage to the power of music.

IF YOU GO:

MARAIKE BRUENING: SUMMER HEART

PERFORMED BY Maraike Bruening

DIRECTED BY Fiona Mackinnon

Venue: Main Auditorium, Tron Theatre, 63 Trongate, Glasgow G1 5HB

Dates: 8 & 9 SEPT, 7.45pm

Tickets: £14 (£10)

Box Office: 0141 552 4267 or www.tron.co.uk

Maraike Brüning, from Germany, has performed in concerts all around Europe and beyond including in France, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Tunisia, Scotland and Ireland. In 2009 she started her studies at the Musikhochschule Lübeck under Prof. Konrad Elser and collaborations and masterclasses with distinguished conductors and pianists such as Prof. Lisa Smirnova, Prof. Klaus Hellwig, Patrick Strub and Steven Osborne rounded her musical education. She recently completed her studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland under the tutelage of Jonathan Plowright.

Fiona graduated from the Directing Classical and Contemporary text course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2015. She was recently assistant director at the Tron Theatre on Shall Roger Casement Hang, a new play by Peter Arnott, alongside directing I'm with Chico, a short play that was performed as part of the Tron 100 Festival in June.

Fiona is particularly interested in playing with live sound and making work that blurs the lines between community and professional. She has worked as a community director on VDay: The Vagina Monologues and Educating Bristol, a new piece of writing about Bristol icon Mary Keller.

Additionally, she has worked as an assistant director on the following projects: One Day in Spring, Oran Mor (Dir: David Greig), Whatever Gets You Through The Night, The Arches (Dir: Cora Bissett), King Lear, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (Dir: Mark Saunders), Tommy's Song, Oran Mor (Dir: Lou Prendergast), Kidnapped, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (Dir: Graham McLaren), Flora's Fairy Challenge, Citizens' Theatre (Dir: Andy Mcgregor).

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