3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another Must Buy for Brect Song Afficionados, April 13, 2001
This review is from: Songs for Bad Times, Vol. 2 (Audio CD)
This second volume of Robyn Archer's renditions of Brecht songs is every bit as good as the first. Her style is flexible and ranges from the hard-edged to the lyrical. Some songs are sung to a piano accompaniment and others have an orchestral backing - but in every case Ms Archer's beautiful diction allows listeners to savor every word of Brecht's pungent verse.
This second volume has a number of well known songs drawn from Brecht's play and opera canon - but it also has lesser known songs with arrangements by Eisler and Dessau that are more like acerbic lieder.
I found the Song of the Moldau, To a Portable radio and The Song of the Nazi Soldier's Wife particularly memorable.
Buy it and enjoy it!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Songs for Bad Times, November 27, 2000
This review is from: Songs for Bad Times, Vol. 2 (Audio CD)
Though the title "Songs for Bad Times" may be a mistake from a marketing point of view, we can be grateful to Larrikin Records for reissuing this long-lost set originally distributed by EMI. In her typically robust style, Austrialian singer and actor Archer has assembled a representative collection of the music three composers--Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau--wrote for songs and poems by Bertolt Brecht.
The themes reflect the contradictions of Brecht's experience as a political playwright who put his talents in the service of a Revolution that never came. From his "didactic" plays of the late Weimar years to his psychologically perceptive wartime poetry, Brecht proved himself to be a writer of power. But often recordings of the music for these works--particularly the poems--are not available in English. All of the texts in this collection are translated into sensitive, musical English, and that is one of the greatest values of this recording.
Backed by the world-renowned London Sinfonietta, "Songs for Bad Times" give the listener the chance to compare the very different styles of three of Brecht's most important collaborators: Weill, Eisler, and Dessau.
Note that on amazon.com, the two CDs of this set are sold as separate items.
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