Lebrecht Weekly | Kurt Weill: Symphonies, Seven Deadly Sins (DG)

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The sound of Berlin in the Weimar years is defined by Kurt Weill. More than any other composer, his music for the Bertolt Brecht shows conjured the jittery, reckless, hopeful, resigned and inventive carousel of a society in perpetual crisis. Weill, son of a Jewish cantor from provincial Dessau, cracked the capital’s musical codes and perpetuated them in songs for his cracked-voice wife, Lotte Lenya. There were also two symphonies, but we don’t talk about those, do we?

The first was shunned in 1921 by Weill’s teacher Ferruccio Busoni as excessively expressionist. It is also indebted to Gustav Mahler, especially in the finale. Weill second symphony was started in January 1933 and finished as an exile in Paris. It starts with the opening figure of Mahler’s second and proceeds down dark and blind alleys in a Hindemith-like alienation. Neither symphony hit the mark, either in concert or on record. The most eloquent recordings that I recall were by the Israeli conductor Gary Bertini and the Busoni expert 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 in the first symphony that I hadn’t heard before, along with multiple self-quotations in the second. These are almost wholly convincing performances. If I heard them in a concert hall, I think I’d be totally won over.

In between, Mallwitz takes us through The Seven Deadly Sins, a concert suite that Weill wrote in Paris with texts by Brecht (whom he’d fallen out with again) and meant for Lenya (who had left him). No caveats here: this is a full-blooded blow-out by five Berlin-accented singers with an axe to grind. This is prime Weill, as echt as it gets. I like it, a lot.

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