Danny Ashkenasi

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Danny Ashkenasi (born 1967 in Berlin ) is a German - American composer and actor .

Life

Ashkenasi was born in Berlin as the son of the soprano Catherine Gayer and the political scientist Abraham "Avi" Ashkenasi . He grew up in Zehlendorf and has a brother, the graduate physicist David Ashkenasi. At the age of five he learned to play the piano, when he was eleven he composed birthday songs for his school friends, and at 14 he set a version of the Grimm fairy tale The Frog King to music . At the age of 15 he worked in the series Rote Erde (director: Klaus Emmerich ) in the role of Max Kruska. He was later seen in the feature film Kraftprüfung (based on Dagmar Kekulé ).

Ashkenasi's music teacher encouraged him to compose a musical, and just before graduating from high school, he premiered Once Upon a Frog on the stage of the John F. Kennedy School . He then worked on various musicals for independent music theater groups in Berlin (including Witches with Peter Lund ) and for the Deutsche Oper Berlin , but soon moved to New York, where he studied theater and got an engagement at the Metropolitan Opera .

Since then, Ashkenasi has created numerous works for musical theater and is also active as a composer of songs and chamber music. He is the only composer who has been invited twice as a finalist to the Hamburg Musical Fair. He still appears as an actor in America and Germany.

Works

  • Witches
  • We don't give a damn about the pickle king (1990)
  • Chaplin's dream
  • Rasputin.com
  • 9/11 - The Book of Job (Rock Oratorio, 2004)
  • Jenseits (A small chamber opera for soprano or high mezzo-soprano, two singing actors and piano; text: Helga Krauss )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Two witches, eight lives - and a lot of the past in the Deutsche Oper. In: Berliner Kurier . February 16, 1998. Retrieved September 21, 2017 .