Their feet stamping in time with the music, the Nexas saxophone quartet flanked Peter Coleman-Wright as the ensemble’s brassy tone gave an exuberant, rhythmic momentum to the baritone’s rendition of Kurt Weill’s Song of the Free. The rousing Song of the Free was the first of the German-turned-American composer’s set of ‘Propaganda Songs’ from the early 1940s, written for the Lunch Hour Follies, a series of shows designed to boost morale for war industry workers in New York.

Dressed in period costume – down to the wide trousers and flat caps – Nexas and Coleman-Wright brought to life the music of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the war period immediately following, when many of the Weimar composers, like Weill, were forced into exile in the USA, in their new show Composers in Exile, which has been programmed as part of this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival.

^{Peter Coleman-Wright and the Nexas Quartet}

Composers in Exile was lightly didactic – a voice-over set the scene with a broad-strokes history of the Weimar Republic, images displayed on a screen behind the stage, before the music got underway – but the performers...