Customer Reviews

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

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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

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.

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

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.

Influenced by the likes of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg in his youth, German composer and later musical theater wunderkind Kurt Weill wrote his first symphony when he was 21 and full of precocious fervor. It is presented here under the masterful baton of Marin Alsop leading the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and the work is a bold, often dissonant single-movement piece. Over the course of its twenty-seven vibrant minutes, you can feel Weill's innate sense of lyricism in the work, but there is also an adolescent angst that makes the work fascinating within the Weill canon. Symphony #2, which opens the disc, is a more accomplished work in three distinct movements. He had written it in 1933, twelve years after the first, when he was living as an expatriate in Paris to escape Nazi Germany. His urgent passion is on full display throughout as if a major disaster is looming, and the music is particularly tinged with a bittersweet poignancy in the middle Largo movement.

Yet, it is really the Symphonic Nocturne for his Broadway classic, "Lady in the Dark", that provides the most vivid impression. Arranged by Robert Russell Bennett, it's an elegant suite of six movements, each familiar melody highlighting a different dramatic element of the show. It begins with the touching Andante misterioso "My Ship", which builds gradually into a swooning work, and then lights into the splendidly evocative "Girl of the Moment", the boldly colored bolero, "This Is New", and the all-out dramatic pizzazz of "Dance of the Tumblers". The work ends with a sassy, insinuating and ultimately stentorian version of "The Saga of Jenny". It's a wondrous work given its due by Alsop, who seems to understand Weill's Tin Pan Alley sensibilities as much as his earlier orchestral ones. This is yet another of Naxos's bargain-priced CDs, and like her recent interpretations of John Adams and Philip Glass, it is beautifully recorded at the Concert Hall, Lighthouse in Dorset, UK. This recording verifies Weill's versatility and Alsop's talent in bringing them to the fore in all their glorious purity.

This CD of orchestral music by Kurt Weill, far better known for his cabaret music, opens with his Symphony No. 2. Hearing this music was a great surprise; it is a remarkable symphony, one that should be heard by anyone who enjoys symphonic music. To encounter this piece is to feel as though you have discovered some long-hidden musical secret. I certainly had no idea that Weill had composed anything at all like this!

Symphony No. 1 is not on the same exalted plane as its successor, but is nonetheless well worth a listen. Unfortunately, the suite that closes this CD is of quite a different mood, taken from a musical theater score and sounding out of place after the two symphonies. I doubt that most folks would want to listen to it more than once.

Although the program is uneven in quality, at the budget Naxos price, this CD is well worth an audition. Weill's Symphony No. 2 is a wonderful piece of music that deserves to be far better known than it is. This CD makes it something that can be heard in great sound on a tight budget. Naxos has done it again!

Kurt Weill is one of the great figures of 20th century music as far as I'm concerned. What fantastic work he did in show music, and especially in collaboration with Bertold Brecht. As a big fan, I was very eager to hear this CD to become acquainted with Kurt Weill the orchestral composer.

After listening to the CD a few times, I enjoyed the 1st Symphony quite a bit. The liner notes describe it as "angular", which is as good a description as any for this atonal work. Very listenable despite its uncompromising compositional model.

I found less pleasure in the 2nd Symphony, which is the centerpiece of the disc. I liked a lot of it and particularly the slow second movement. But one of the dominant themes in the first movement -- a broadly swaying waltz that for me recalled a boat bobbing around on rough seas -- was just not to my taste. Your taste may be different, in which case you may love this work.

The CD is rounded out with an orchestral suite from Weill's music to the show "Lady in Dark", which I felt was pretty pedestrian. Not much to recommend it -- it is the kind of bland filler you'd expect at a pops concert, or the overly Romanticized soundtrack to a film set somewhere in the 1890s-1920s. It sounds like there should be men in suits with waistcoats and derby hats involved somehow.

I'm glad I heard this music, but I don't think I'll be coming back to it often, beyond perhaps an occasional listen to the 1st Symphony or the slow movement of the 2nd.

It took Naxos a while to get around to these two important works, but the performances we get are on the other hand quite excellent. Kurt Weill's symphonies have actually experienced a resurgence in popularity the last fifteen years and are currently, it seems, at least as popular as the (far superior) Honegger symphonies - works to which the Weill ones, in particular the first, bear some resemblance. The first symphony is a rugged beast of a work, cast in a single movement full of power and color but sacrificing structure for momentum. It is clearly the weaker work, but it still deserves to be heard.

The second symphony is a great work, on the other hand, if not quite counting itself among the very greatest symphonic masterpieces of the twentieth century. It is an imaginatively executed, powerful piece of neo-classicism, generally dark and pugnacious interspersed with bittersweet lyricism, and sporting some excellent thematic material. Naxos's filler is the by Robert Russell Bennett arranged Symphonic Nocturne from Lady in the Dark; not among Weill's greatest scores, perhaps, but quite effective (and provides an interesting contrast to - but also interesting points of continuity with - the symphonies).

So how do the performances stand up? Very well, in fact; Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra are superb in the first symphony, creating a movement of blistering energy and granitic power (it is surely fine in the Lady in the Dark suite as well, but since that one is less my cup of tea I am not sure my judgment is entirely trustworthy here). In the second, the present performances might not completely realize the momentum achieved by e.g. Jansons, but isn't far behind; colorful and atmospheric in the slow movement, taut and relatively fiery in the outer movements. Besides the orchestral playing is marvelous. The sound quality is generally good, although a little too boomy. Still, this is an impressive achievement that deserves a very firm recommendation.

the symphonies are comprised of themes from other weill works such as 'seven deadly sins' and 'rise and fall of the city of mahagonny' and weill has turned his themes out to symphony legth admirably.

the interpretation by martin alsop and the bso, however, leaves something to be desired. it's very much by the book and lacking in texture and dynamic.

i'm sure that there is a better performance out there in the world, maybe even one conducted by a contemporary of weill's like maurice abravanel(sp?). that okay; i needed to start this collection weill's orchestral stuffs somewhere.

I bought this because I'm a big fan of Weill's Three Penny Opera and wanted to get a sense of what his other works were like. I've listened to Weill's symphonies several times now, and I can't help but conclude that they are uninspired and unfocused. I just don't think he was cut out to compose works in the traditional classical genres. Lady in the Dark at least has some good tunes that are well orchestrated.