The Kurt Weill Album (DG)
★★★★☆
The sound of Berlin within the Weimar years is outlined by Kurt Weill. Greater than every other composer, his music for the Bertolt Brecht reveals conjured the jittery, reckless, hopeful, resigned, and ingenious carousel of a society in perpetual disaster. Weill, son of a Jewish cantor from provincial Dessau, cracked the capital’s musical codes and perpetuated them in songs for his cracked-voice spouse, Lotte Lenya. There have been additionally two symphonies, however we don’t discuss these, will we?
The primary was shunned in 1921 by Weill’s instructor Ferruccio Busoni as excessively expressionist. It is usually indebted to Gustav Mahler, particularly within the finale. Weill’s second symphony was began in January 1933 and completed as an exile in Paris. It begins with the opening determine of Mahler’s second and proceeds down darkish and blind alleys in a Hindemith-like alienation. Neither symphony hit the mark, both in live performance or on document.
Probably the most eloquent recordings that I recall had been by the Israeli conductor Gary Bertini and the Busoni professional Antony Beaumont. Time for a rethink?
Berlin’s Konzerthausorchester and its conductor Joana Mallwitz give an unerringly local-patriotic tinge to the symphonies in timbres that veer from glamour and grit with barely a flicker of the ironic eyebrow. Mallwitz brings out cabaret anticipations within the first symphony that I hadn’t heard earlier than, together with a number of self-quotations within the second. These are nearly wholly convincing performances. If I heard them in a live performance corridor, I believe I’d be completely received over.
In between, Mallwitz takes us via The Seven Lethal Sins, a live performance suite that Weill wrote in Paris with texts by Brecht (whom he’d fallen out with once more) and meant for Lenya (who had left him). No caveats right here: this can be a full-blooded blow-out by 5 Berlin-accented singers with an axe to grind.
That is prime Weill, as echt because it will get. I prefer it, quite a bit.
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Norman Lebrecht is among the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s an everyday presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Road Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
