Search - Kurt Weill, Robert [1] Russell Bennett, Marin Alsop :: Kurt Weill: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2; Lady in the Dark - Symphonic Nocturne

Three Sides of Kurt Weill

J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 08/17/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Of course, Kurt Weill is primarily known for his theater music --e.g., Three Penny Opera, Mahagonny -- but long before he began collaborating with Brecht he had been a serious student of composition, primarily of Ferruccio Busoni. This CD contains his two symphonies, very different in musical style but each clearly having the 'Weill' sound, and also an orchestral suite devised from his Broadway musical 'Lady in the Dark.' Weill's orchestral music has been pretty much ignored in favor of his theatrical works, but I remember a really quite wonderful collection of his non-theatre works in the old LP days with David Atherton conducting the London Sinfonietta. I don't know if it ever made it to CD, but would certainly urge anyone interested in Weill's works to try to find it. That collection has no duplications of the works presented here.



The Symphony (called No. 1 here, although not designated as such by Weill) was written when he was still studying with Busoni in 1921. It is essentially an expressionist work and rather more formally 'serious' than some of his later works, but some of the Weillian harmonic fingerprints are already present. In one long movement -- it runs 27 minutes -- it is divided into three interlinked sections. The musical language is more astringent, perhaps, than we are used to with Weill, but there are also some proto-jazz elements including liberal use of blue notes and chords of the ninth. There is a chorale section toward the end that is surpassingly lovely. This wonderful piece lay unplayed for many years, having its premiere only in the 1950s. It had been thought lost until a copy of the manuscript was found, surprisingly and mysteriously, in a convent in Italy!



The Second Symphony was written in 1933 and premiered by Bruno Walter in Amsterdam the following year and played in New York the year after that. By this time Weill had become famous from the success of his 'Dreigroschenoper' but the symphony was received with not very much enthusiasm and it, too, went unplayed again until the 1980s. In three movements, it is quite clearly in Weill's familiar style; I doubt anyone familiar with the Three Penny Opera would hesitate for a moment to identify its composer. There is plenty of mock seriousness and satirical use of instruments (e.g., trudging trombone chords intoning semicomic, semitragic tunes) and is a wholly satisfying effort. I must say that the Bournemouth Symphony's players do a marvelous job of catching the work's mixture of melancholy and mockery.



The third piece played here is a suite from Weill's Broadway success, 'Lady in the Dark,' orchestrated by the quintessential Broadway orchestrator of that day, Robert Russell Bennett (best-known for being the orchestrator of most of Richard Rodgers' Broadway shows). 'Lady in the Dark' was a huge success at least partly because it was the first Broadway musical to treat the subject, then hot as a house afire, of psychoanalysis. The Suite contains not only treatments of some of the musical's best-known numbers ('My Ship,' 'Girl of the Moment' and 'The Saga of Jenny') but also some of the musical underpinning of the action. The orchestration is, understandably, expert and winning. My only complaint is that another famous number, 'Tchaikovsky,' made famous by Danny Kaye, is not included.



Marin Alsop, recently named the first woman to be the music director of a major American orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, is well on her way to becoming a conductorial superstar, and this CD, with her conducting the Bournemouth Symphony (of which she is principal conductor) will do much to enhance that burgeoning reputation. Alsop has recently started a cycle of Brahms symphony recordings and this Weill disc helps to establish her as a conductor with a wide range of repertoire. I frankly find myself being eager to hear anything she records.



Strongly recommended.



Scott Morrison"

REVERSE THRUST

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 11/10/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This disc has been very thoughtfully edited. For one thing, the six pieces comprising the Lady in the Dark suite are played without intervening pauses (although there are separate tracks), which is as it should be, like a band playing half a dozen numbers in succession on a bandstand. What is far more important, and very intelligent too, is sequencing the second symphony before the first. The first symphony dates from 1921, the second from 1933/4, and the `symphonic nocturne' (what's one of them?) Lady in the Dark from 1940. If the works had been presented in straight order of composition it would have been very easy to form the impression that Weill's musical idiom was a backward-running process. The first symphony was a work he never acknowledged by that title. It comes from early in his course in composition with Busoni, and I read with great interest that he was the youngest member to be accepted, at age 20 in the year 1920, into that class, when in the very same year Busoni had refused to take on the 17-year-old Serkin as a piano pupil on the grounds that he was too old. In style this first symphony is very assured, its idiom hovering somewhere in the region of Honegger and Hindemith. It is in one movement, and a good deal longer than the most famous contemporary 1-movement symphony, the 7th of Sibelius. The second symphony is in a more normal 3-movement format, and it makes odd listening to the extent that its idiom seems to become more conservative as it goes along. The opening movement is not too far removed in style from the first symphony, but we have not got far into the long central slow movement before we hear a bassoon solo that is the Weill we know, followed later by some familiar-sounding brass writing and leading to a placid tonal conclusion. As for the Lady in the Dark, a collaboration with Ira Gershwin is not where one would expect to find modern harmonisation, and the Weill of the Threepenny Opera is with us once more.



I found the whole experience utterly intriguing. Weill's second symphony was composed in Paris to commission after he fled the new regime of gangsters in Germany. It seems to have had a dim reception and then to have been palely loitering unperformed for several decades. I for one had never heard it until I bought this disc, and I think it is something that would get me to bestir myself out to a concert if I saw it scheduled. Indeed I think the first symphony might well do that too. What its composer really thought of it I don't know, but it doesn't have any apprentice feel to it, and its single fantasia-like movement is nearly as long as the three movements of the second added up. Weill in his symphonic guise, particularly his early symphonic guise, is not entirely the man we might expect from the familiar stuff, but the genius and originality are still there. His second symphony is a far more serious bit of work than are the symphonies of Weber, but I felt all the same that it stands in some similar relation to the heavier masterpieces of its period, the symphonies of Mahler, Sibelius and Elgar, as Weber's do to Beethoven's.



If the symphonies are a journey of discovery, the Lady in the Dark (about psychoanalysis apparently) is definitely for Weill's fans, of whom I am one. The performances here strike me as just right, with the proper (or improper) seedy tone to them. The Bournemouth Symphony have been a fine orchestra for quite a long time now, at least since Silvestri's day, and Marin Alsop has been steadily advancing in recognition for a number of years too. The recording is very recent, just last year, and while it's not spectacular it is perfectly good by any rational standard. We are given here an hour and a quarter of absolutely fascinating music superbly realised, and even the liner-note, which comes with a German translation, is far better than many I see from the more traditional recording concerns. My notices of Naxos productions tend to finish, or begin, or both, with a panegyric to that fine company and its collaborators, and this one follows the tradition. Long may things be this way."

The Other Kurt Weill

M. C. Passarella | Lawrenceville, GA | 11/30/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"First off, let me say that I'm not a fan of Kurt Weill, at least what I knew by him prior to an acquaintance with the symphonies. His Kleine Dreigroschenmusik, based on the "Threepenny Opera" is the kind of twenties modernism from Germany that doesn't really send me--strident, cheeky, bumptious about mixing pop and classical music in a way that doesn't redound to the glory of either. Hence my great surprise at hearing Weill's Symphony No. 2. Here is a work that doesn't compromise on the composer's sardonic musical language yet doesn't pander either. It's a bit of hard-as-nails modernism that predictably didn't go down well with its earliest audiences. Maybe they wanted bread and circuses. Instead, Weill gave them weltschmerz 1930s style.



This is austere music, stripped to the bare essentials, employing a relatively small orchestra without percussion save for timpani. It does have a restless energy in the outer movements, both of which are well argued and very listenable, the last movement bustling along to sardonic march tempo that's strangely infectious. Does Weill foresee a mania for marching in Germany's future? (By the time of the Symphony's completion, he was in exile in Paris.) But the most remarkable movement is the long central Largo. It manages at once to be mordant and melancholy--not an easy proposition--reminding me of the slow movements from Suk's Asrael Symphony and Barber's Symphony No. 2 of a decade later. All these slow movements have the same oddly chilly dignity.



Weill's Symphony No. 1 could almost be considered an apprentice work. Written in 1921 when the composer was 21, it is in a single movement but falls into three distinct sections: fast, slow, fast. The fast sections are spiky and somewhat amorphous, the slow movement troubled and anxious, with a marching ground bass and a weird, discordant canon that leads to a semi-sweet solo for the violin, the orchestra still rumbling and grumbling underneath. Things are hardly leavened by the finale, which unfolds like a series of angular variations on a chorale theme. The work ends with a percussion-heavy bang, then a whimper. Odd music this--not entirely successful but definitely interesting; you want to hear it again just to see if you can dope it all out.



After this hard-bitten modernism, the "Symphonic Nocturne" based on Weill's 1940 Broadway musical "Lady in the Dark" seems a weird choice. Since there isn't very much purely orchestral Weill, I guess the producers were hard-pressed for filler, but even the ubiquitous Dreigroschenmusik would have been better than this fluff. Orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett, it sounds like Gershwin without the moxie--or the melodies. Oh well, you can choose not to come back for more. But you will want to return to the symphonies, especially the fascinating Second.



Marin Alsop is proving herself a force to be reckoned with in modern music. She and the Bournemouth Symphony give Weill their all, and Naxos contributes fine, full sound with lots of color and presence. I may be cool about the "Nocturne," but the rest of this CD is decidedly hot."