If you believe that musical theatre is a great art form for satire that highlights man’s inhumanity to man, you can’t do much better than the combination of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. The programme for last night’s Barbican concert could hardly have been more enticing for Weill fans: an opener of Kleine Dreigroschenmusik, Weill’s instrumental rendering of some of the best numbers in The Threepenny Opera, followed by The Seven Deadly Sins, with a filler of four of Weill’s finest songs.
The Kleine Dreigroschenmusik is a brilliant pot-pourri of pastiche styles from Lutheran chorale to tango, the living proof that acid satire is just as present in Weill’s music as in Brecht’s words. It’s scored for a theatre pit band: a dozen wind players, piano, percussion and guitar/banjo. Its jazzy accessibility belies underlying polyphonic complexity. The wind players interweave multiple melodic lines and each instrumentalist is very exposed. Sadly, Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra did not make a good early impression. There were good intentions of bringing out the humour in the work, but it was bedevilled by small timing errors and several tempi felt rushed, with the contour of phrases not developed and a distinct lack of the sleaze that should pervade the music in numbers such as Die Ballade vom angenehmen Leben and the Tango-Ballade. Levels were often off-kilter, a notable example being where a tune played on trombone was much softer than the fills from the tuba seated next to it.
Things picked up for a powerful rendering of the faux chorale finale, but balance problems persisted throughout the rest of the concert (all vocal), with the orchestra generally far too loud for the singers. This was a shame because there was some wonderful singing which was audible, but only if one strained to hear it through the orchestral sound; we could really have done with some amplification.
Death in the Forest is one of Weill’s most surprising works, a Sprechstimme cantata depicting a dark tale of a man dying in the forest as his companions wait impatiently for him to die. Bass-baritone Florian Boesch was nuanced and emotional, a superb musical storyteller, but the two accompanying trombones, brilliant as they were, made it hard for us to hear him. Baritone Ross Ramgoblin suffered a similar fate in his potent, declamatory Beat! Beat! Drums!, Walt Whitman’s depiction of the terror of Civil War armies which leave no life untouched. Tenor Andrew Staples fared better with another Whitman setting, Dirge For Two Veterans, and with the beautifully evocative Lonely House from Street Scene.