A belated thank you for your support, Antonio.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Kurt Weill - Symphonies; Quodlibet (Antony Beaumont)


Information

Composer: Kurt Weill
  • (01-07) Symphony No. 1
  • (08-11) Quodlibet, Op. 9
  • (12-14) Symphony No. 2

Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen
Antony Beaumont, conductor

Date: 2006
Label: Chandos
https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%205046

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Review

ARTISTIC QUALITY: 10 / SOUND QUALITY: 10

Busoni scholar Antony Beaumont has had mixed success as a conductor. He's certainly more comfortable in the wryly modernist world of Kurt Weill than as an exponent of Zemlinsky's hothouse romanticism, and this disc is outstanding in every way. This also is a CD premiere of sorts, in that Beaumont is the first conductor to record Weill's Second Symphony with the composer's original percussion parts. These were added, it is true, at the suggestion of Bruno Walter at the time of the premiere, but they are entirely Weill's and he approved of them. Indeed, this was the only way he heard the symphony in his own lifetime, and there is no evidence, as Beaumont points out, that he ever had a second thought such as would justify David Drew's later decision to omit them from the score published by Schott.

As Beaumont also points out, the ear must be the final judge, and here he's also made the right decision--and I say this not because I happen to be a percussionist. This symphony is full of rhythmic accompaniments, marches in particular, that only gain color and point by the discrete addition of Weill's tastefully made extra parts. They bring the work even more into the world of the exactly contemporaneous ballet The Seven Deadly Sins, which is all to the good. This version ought henceforth to become the standard edition, and more to the point, Beaumont and the Bremen Chamber Philharmonic prove to be ideal Weill advocates.

This performance is magnificently played: crisp, unsentimental, but at the same time sensitively nuanced (especially in the long central slow movement). Rather than adding to the music's sheer decibel level, or detracting from the purely musical argument, the extra percussion really does help, both in giving the Largo that extra bit of gravitas, or permitting the goose-stepping march in the finale to make its parodistic point without the need for heaviness or exaggeration. It's a tribute to Beaumont's interpretation that in his hands the music takes on additional substance, all at comparatively fleet tempos that preserve the symphony's bittersweet ambivalence of feeling.

The Quodlibet actually is a substantial suite in four movements crafted from music that Weill wrote in 1923 for a children's pantomime called Zaubernacht. Why it's not played more frequently remains a mystery: it's vintage early Weill, right on the verge of his mature "music hall" style, and it makes splendidly substantial listening. The only real competition in this work comes from Hänssler, an excellent performance paired with Anja Silja's outstanding Seven Deadly Sins. This version is every bit as well-played, sharper in rhythm and texture, and even livelier in terms of its energy level and sense of fun.

The experimental First Symphony is a tougher nut, but here again Beaumont and his orchestra provide a reading of exceptional transparency, even elegance. Despite some occasional clumsiness, Weill's was a compelling musical personality even at this early point in his career (1921). Above all, he had an inborn sense of timing that both keeps this single-movement work moving forward and tells him exactly when it's time to stop. There's also plenty of thematic and textural interest, as well as surface appeal, so it's very rewarding to encounter a performance that takes this curiously compelling work seriously enough to get it to sound genuinely purposeful. Excellent engineering in both stereo and SACD multichannel formats makes this the one Kurt Weill symphony disc that you simply must own. [9/5/2006]

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday

More reviews:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jul/07/classicalmusicandopera.art4
https://www.allmusic.com/album/weill-symphony-no-1-quodlibet-symphony-no-2-mw0001844805

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Kurt Weill (March 2, 1900 – April 3, 1950) was a German composer, who became a United States citizen in 1943. Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, such as Weill's best-known work The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill's music was admired by Berg, Zemlinsky, Milhaud and Stravinsky, but was also criticised Schoenberg and Webern. Sixty years after his death, Weill's music continues to be performed both in popular and classical contexts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Weill

***

Antony Beaumont (born 1949) is an English and German musicologist, writer, conductor and violinist. Born in London, Beaumont moved to Germany after his graduation from the University of Cambridge and became a German citizen. As a conductor, he has specialized in German music from the first half of the 20th century, including works by Zemlinsky, Weill, and Gurlitt. Beaumont has held conducting posts with orchestras in Bremen, Cologne, and Saarbrücken, and has guest conducted opera productions in England and Italy. As a musicologist, he has published books on Busoni, Zemlinsky, and Mahler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Beaumont

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