Weill / Brecht: Die Sieben Todsünden

Kegel, Herbert, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Leipzig, Schreier, Peter

95126

Kurt Weill’s ‘ballet with singing’ is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century musical theatre, recorded several times down the years but perhaps not as frequently as its merits deserve thanks to the very specific demands of its style, and the lack of singers who can match up to the muse for both Weill and Brecht, Lotte Lenya. Lenya made the first widely available recording, decades after she gave the first performance in Paris in 1933; this was the second, first issued in 1968, using not Weill’s original but a later ‘performing version’ prepared especially for Lenya. It stands the test of time well: Gisela May has the requisite smoky quality and total familiarity with Brecht’s cabaret-German. She is supported by a small cast of ‘Classical’ singers – notable among them Peter Schreier – but also by a conductor, Herbert Kegel, whose East German training and sympathies enable him to ensure that this music goes with the requisite sleazy swing without tipping into self-indulgent vulgarity. As Gramophone’s original reviewer remarked, ‘Brecht’s libretto strips bourgeois morality bare. Weill’s music, keen, clear and precise, is tender without being sentimental, at once compassionate and critical.’ In this reissue, The Seven Deadly Sins is coupled with some of the best-known hits from the rocky but fertile creative partnership between Weill and Brecht, all sung by Gisela May, and accompanied by a small studio ensemble conducted by another distinguished East German musician who understood the tenor of his time, Heinz Rögner, and deserves to be remembered for more than his excellent Bruckner recordings (reissued on Brilliant Classics 94686). There is ‘Surabaya Johnny’ from Happy End, of course, and the ‘Havana Song’ from Mahagonny, the Ballad of Sexual Dependency from The Threepenny Opera and two numbers from the scathingly satirical Berliner Requiem.

CD x 1

Brilliant Classics

13/11/2019

5028421951263