English Bach Festival
With grim precision, Kurt Weill's life spanned half of the twentieth century, from birth in Dessau in 1900, then flight from the Nazis in 1933 to death in New York in 1950. Just as we haven't worked out what that half-century of history means, so we still can't decide about Weill. A second-rate composer, or the authentic voice of his time? A radical experimenter, or a populist whose true home was Broadway?
Our picture of the composer is fragmentary, not least because so much of his work remains unheard here. Some missing pieces slotted into place during the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Kurt Weill Weekend. In eight concerts over three days, we got one European premiere and two UK premieres. Rightly, the focus was on stage works, but there was no Threepenny Opera, no Mahagonny, no Seven Deadly Sins , although songs from the first two featured in a late-night Weill anthology belted out by Ute Lemper. While Lemper has immense charisma she has been singing her Weill tributes for over a decade, and the show had the high-gloss finish of a greatest hits (hers and Weill's) package.
There were surprises elsewhere, however. A version of the operetta Der Kuhhandel (Shady Dealing) flopped in London in 1935 and has not been seen since; here we got Jeremy Sams's new translation of the German original. Sams's verbal legerdemain was well-intentioned, but its cleverness only made the piece sound like Gilbert and Sullivan. The satire, about arms dealers, politicians and the price of love, had some bite, and would have had more in 1935, and Weill's music was efficient, but with only occasional moments of characteristic pungency in a string figure here, a brass fanfare there.
It was a coup to include the European premiere of The Firebrand of Florence, which opens with a number of such savage sarcasm that it might be a fragment of Brecht/Weill: a hangman, eager to execute the 'firebrand' Benvenuto Cellini, mournfully informs us that 'one man's death is another man's living'. This, though, is no Brechtian epic but an American musical on a grand scale. If it ended up trapped within generic boundaries, Weill's music being too subservient to Ira Gershwin's lyrics, it was well played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Davis.
It was music from Weill's German period which moved me most. The Brecht settings, Das Berliner Requiem and Der Lindberghflug , proved as corrosive as ever, and the opera-ballet Royal Palace was an unexpected sensation. Iwan Goll's libretto offers a surrealist's take on the Eternal Feminine: the heroine Dejanira rejects men, wisely preferring life as a mermaid, and you couldn't wish for a more alluring mermaid than Janice Watson. Weill gave it the works, right down to the shivery tango that transforms woman into mermaid. Royal Palace was a highlight of a fascinating weekend which confirmed that, whatever the unevenness of the pieces, Weill tells us as much as any composer about the century we've just left.
The English Bach Festival (EBF) quotes a eulogy from Stravinsky in its publicity: 'One of the most distinguished and valuable musical organisations in the world today.' Stravinsky died in 1971, so his 'today' is not ours, and nor is the EBF exactly cutting-edge, theatrically or musically. This week it occupied the Royal Opera House's subterranean Linbury Studio Theatre, alternating operatic variants on the Greek myth of Orestes.
Handel's Oreste , dating from 1734, was the first of his operas to be premiered at Covent Garden, although it wasn't strictly a new piece: with Ariodante set to open thee weeks later, Handel cobbled most of it from music he had already composed for other operas. That needn't be a problem, but EBF has the quaint notion that the way to make Handel work is to attempt to re-create baroque stagecraft, including choreography.
It doesn't work. Tom Hawkes's staging was gauche, Stephen Preston's choreography graceless and Terence Emery's designs tacky. The baroque era lacked the concept of kitsch, but this production had it in spades. The cast I saw was drawn from students from the Royal Academy of Music, and perhaps the main, professional cast might have imposed itself more, but it couldn't have made a silk purse out of this. Although Frances Bourne's Oreste was more than promising, the period-instrument orchestra looked and sounded uninvolved.
It was mildly distressing to see elements of the same production serving for Iannis Xenakis's Oresteia , but if Alain Germain's staging was hardly adventurous, the music received a rousing performance under Guy Protheroe. With contrabass clarinet and contrabassoon growling angrily and a vast battery of percussion clattering mightily, energy levels were high, and the cast was clearly convinced that the ancient Greek text made sense. Gratitude, then, to EBF for this rare staging of Xanakis, a composer more respected than performed. When the same was true of Handel's operas, this Oreste might have passed muster, but it won't do now.
