No sooner has the fuss over the Poulenc centenary died down, then it all starts again for another overrated 20th-century composer. The 100th anniversary of Kurt Weill's birth actually falls next March, but the South Bank Centre is anticipating the occasion, with Sunday's performance of The Threepenny Opera as the centrepiece of its celebration.
Whatever Weill's merits, his cause was not well served by this brash, problematic concert version of his most famous work, sung in German (with highly fanciful surtitles that sometimes bore scant relation to Brecht's texts) and a linking narrative delivered in English. It was evidently the first public performance of the new, authorised edition of a score that has been given in all manner of hybrid versions over the years. The original scoring has been clarified and two numbers omitted from the 1928 premiere - Lucy's Aria and Mrs Peachum's Ballad of the Prisoner of Sexuality - reinstated.
The playing of the superb Ensemble Modern certainly gave pungency to those textures, but it was virtually impossible to hear them in a proper perspective when all the singers were so aggressively and unnecessarily amplified. Such relentless, in-your-face attitudinising turned Brecht's lyrics (the main point of the piece, let's be honest, for Weill's sour chorales and surly counterpoint are the medium rather than the message) into aggressive agitprop. Irony went out of the window and the sour-sweet contrast of words and music was tempered; everything became a charmless rant.
As well as conducting the performance, HK Gruber delivered ("sung" is too strong a word) The Ballad of Mack the Knife. Sona MacDonald was Polly and Bernd Fröhlich Macheath, but the most impressive singing came from Winnie Böwe, who made the most of the coloratura opportunities of Lucy's Aria, shining out like a jewel in this over-machined performance. And surely for a British audience a narrator whose first language was English would have been preferable to Wolf Kahler? European integration can be taken too far...
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable
** Mediocre * Terrible
