An outstanding contribution to the Weill discography

Kurt Weill: Two Symphonies, Der Silbersee excerpts

Der Silbersee was Kurt Weill's European swan-song; premiered in Berlin in February 1933, it was banned by the Nazis in March, and Weill was forced to flee, first to Paris, and then to New York. The text, by Georg Kaiser, is as strongly satirical as anything by Bertolt Brecht:

Raise a tower with walls of stone around you,
You won’t hear the wretched cries outside.
Be blind, be deaf, never write off a debt,
You’d lose your money and the gains from it.
Don’t ever deny the greatest of all profit:
Interest and compound interest.

Weill's music for Der Silbersee reminds me of his great musical theatre works with Brecht: The Threepenny Opera (1928), Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), and The Seven Deadly Sins (1933). "The Song of the Lottery Ticket Seller" from the first act, "Was zahlen Sie für einen Rat?", uses the same tango rhythms we know from those works. There's a jarring contrast between the pungent text (beautifully projected here by HK Gruber) and the lovely orchestral accompaniment that perfectly sums up Weill's best music. There are only a few excerpts from the score, but they're choice.

When Kurt Weill made his way to Paris in 1933 he began work with Brecht on The Seven Deadly Sins, and you can hear echoes of this work in his Symphony no. 2, which was completed in 1934. This marvellous Symphony is close to the top of my list of obscure orchestral works that deserve to be programmed and recorded much more frequently. He's taken the accessible theatre music which had become his hallmark, and neatly slotted it within the classical symphony form of Haydn and Mozart. What a shame that the critical pans that followed its premiere at the Concertgebouw under Bruno Walter pushed Weill to swear off concert music for the rest of his career. 

Before any of these works mentioned, back in 1921, Kurt Weill had written his Symphony in One Movement (his First). His characterization of it: "By Mahler, out of Strauss, trained by Schoenberg." Weill cleverly melds the neo-romantic tradition with leading edge serialism. This is more than juvenilia; it's an accomplished work in its own right. Weill has the compositional skill this early in his composing career to produce music that has value a century later.

HK Gruber is a fascinating person: a one-time child chorister with the Vienna Boys Choir, he became a virtuoso of the double-bass, a composer and conductor. He's also an outstanding singer and actor, and a great advocate for the music of Kurt Weill. Gruber's own view of Weill:

"He brought complexity and popular music under one hat. It makes no difference between light music and serious music — just a kind of music which is simply honest."

This project is a perfect example of honest performance of great music; with stellar support from the musicians of the Swedish Chamber Choir, we have here an outstanding contribution to the Weill discography.

The wonderful cover photo of The Lichtburg cinema in Berlin is by Martin Höhlig, from 1929.

This album was released on February 3, 2023.