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

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

Tracks:

Sostenuto - Allegro Molto - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Largo - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Allegro Vivace - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Symphony No.1 - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Andante Misterioso 'My Ship' - Robert Russell Bennett
'Girl Of The Moment' - Robert Russell Bennett
Bolero 'This Is New' - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Allegro Alla Marcia - Robert Russell Bennett
'Dance Of The Tumblers' - Robert Russell Bennett
'The Saga Of Jenny' - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

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:

weilling away hours to sweet sounds.......2007-05-11

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.

5 Stars for the Weill 1st sym.......2006-04-09

I'm only here to discuss the Weill incredible poetic and beautiful toned 1st sym.
My first choice might be the Prausnitz/New Philharmonia/EMI which is OOP, but worth the looking for.
Next choice might be the Baden/Kracow/Koch, OOP
3rd choice maight be the Swierczewski/Gulbenkian SO/Nimbus , still in print.
Next comes the Alsop/Bournemouth, as David Bryson wrote, "while not spectacular, still a worthy recording"
But then David goes on to write "Superbly realized".
Now here I have to diasgree. As the other 3 recordings mentioned deliver a greater depth and tonal phrasing.

Still hats off to Miss Alsop for recording a neglected masterpiece. She is still young in her caree and we expect other good things as well in the near future.
I can just hear the ol George Szell fans right now,
But she's no where as great as was our glorious Szell:.
Well I don't own any szell recordings, I've always found Szell to be good, but never excellent.
Except in the Strauss last 4 songs with Schwartkopf with the BERLIN RADIO SO.
Szell's Cleveland recordings were always average as far as I'm concerned.
I'm just comming around to Weill's 2nd sym, and good as it is, his 1st is superior. The 2nd seems to borrow too many ideas from the 1st, thus the 1st is more original.
The Lady in the dark work are a series of light broadway style music.

Three Wondrous Weill Works Given Star Treatment by Alsop's Supremely Assured Direction.......2006-01-04

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.

The Other Kurt Weill.......2005-12-01

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 comprise 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.

REVERSE THRUST.......2005-11-11

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.

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