Kurt Weill: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2; Lady in the Dark - Symphonic Nocturne

Kurt Weill (Composer), Robert [1] Russell Bennett (Composer), Marin Alsop (Conductor), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (Orchestra) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Orchestra: Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
• Conductor: Marin Alsop
• Composer: Kurt Weill, Robert [1] Russell Bennett
• Audio CD (August 16, 2005)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Naxos
• ASIN: B000A17GFQ
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #53,338 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

About nine minutes into the second track of this disc, you seem to hear the composer reminding himself: "Hey, I'm Kurt Weill! This is what my music sounds like!" Most of us know only Weill's theater music, but he began his career writing concert pieces. The First Symphony was written under the tutelage of the great composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni. Both symphonies belong to the European mainstream of the early 1920s, but Weill's characteristic style infiltrates only the Second (placed first on the CD), his last pure concert work, composed after the famous Threepenny Opera. These symphonies may not compete with Stravinsky and Bartók in their importance, but they are both satisfying pieces and will interest both lovers of 20th-century symphonies and fans of Weill's later music--of which we get a nice chunk as an encore. The Weill Symphonies have been scarce on recordings. Here they are performed with great energy and purpose by an excellent conductor and orchestra, vividly recorded, at a price which encourages exploration. --Leslie Gerber

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Three Sides of Kurt Weill, August 17, 2005

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J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kurt Weill: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2; Lady in the Dark - Symphonic Nocturne (Audio CD)

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

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars REVERSE THRUST, November 10, 2005

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DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kurt Weill: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2; Lady in the Dark - Symphonic Nocturne (Audio CD)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kurt Weill - a Spectrum of His Importance, October 11, 2005

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Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kurt Weill: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2; Lady in the Dark - Symphonic Nocturne (Audio CD)

Kurt Weill is probably as well known for his personal biography as for his music. A man unafraid to take on political issues in a time when such activities were not only suspect but condemned, Weill began his creative life with classical training and produced some simply magnificent works before his antics and his success with the 'Die Dreigroschen Oper' catapulted him to international renown. Once the Threepenny Opera was on the stages of every country his more serious music took a back seat. Here the exciting conductor Marin Alsop corrects some of those missing gaps.

Conducting her own Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra she demonstrates what supple control she gains over knotty music scores. The Symphony No. 1 is lyrically and expressively exciting as an extended one movement work while the Symphony No. 2 uses all of the background sustained in No. 1, embroidering it with that wonderful sarcasm and bite found in his immediately preceding Threepenny Opera score. And Alsop pays homage to another aspect of Weill's theater music with an elegant reading of the Symphonic Nocturne from 'Lost in the Stars'.

Fortunate we are that Marin Alsop is now ensconced with the Baltimore Symphony here in the US as she is a formidable talent on the podium, and a fervent crusader of neglected works. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, October 05