Parlando Presents The CIty Without Jews
Ian Niederhofer Conducts Olga Neuwirth
By: Susan Hall - Oct 06, 2026
Ian Niederhofer founded Parlando a little over five years ago, and his programming has been both adventuresome and unusual.
His presentation of the film The City Without Jews, produced in 1924 and then lost, was an important step in restoring our picture of the culture of Central Europe in the crucial period between the First and Second World Wars.
The film itself is black-and-white and a mishmash of images. The core story of an Aryan girl who falls in love with a Jewish man is both touching and funny.
When it is decided that the Jews must leave Utopia (or Vienna), and we see masses of Jews marching out of town with the few possessions they could carry and boarding trains to nowhere, the period that would come later during the Second World War is impressed on us again. The Final Solution lurks over the film, even in its funnier moments.
The distinguished composer Olga Neuwirth undertook the score. She is known for her political art—often satirizing tyrants and working with her childhood friend, the Nobel Prize–winning writer Elfriede Jelinek. She is a composer in the European tradition.
In the informative talk Mr. Niederhofer gave before the screenings began, he explained that Ms. Neuwirth had hoped to capture a memory of the early twenties and provide haunting music that reminds us of the prescience of the film.
Under Mr. Niederhofer’s leadership, the small band—consisting of flute, clarinet, saxophone, trombone, trumpet, electric guitar, string instruments, keyboard, and percussion—was intensified by pre-recorded phrases and electronic amplification.
The keyboard featured many different sounds, while pre-recorded effects included a Styrofoam block and a milk frother. These sou nds combined to suggest a restles and confused world. You van hear suggestions of cabaret, and folk music crush against electronic drones and abrasive phrases. There are also distiortions of the Pomp and Circumstance March and Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. Neuwirth’s sound images resonate as a mindful backdrop to the film.
Mr. Niederhofer served as engineer as well as conductor, bringing forth Ms. Neuwirth’s masterful mudsic.
This first program of four in the 2026–2027 season leaves the audience with an appetite for more—interesting, engaging, and absorbing.