KURT WEILL: It’s not an anniversary, but that
doesn’t mean his music isn’t more timely than
ever. |
The Cantata Singers’ promising Kurt Weill season (“Unveiling Weill”) features a number of local premieres and other seldom performed pieces by the composer of Die Dreigroschenoper, Mahagonny Songspiel, and Lady in the Dark. Weill was born in 1900 and died in 1950, so this year isn’t even a major anniversary. But Cantata Singers director David Hoose must feel that Weill’s music is more timely than ever.
In Der Lindberghflug (“The Lindbergh Flight”), Hoose announced before its first Boston-area performance, Weill was making an effort to move from “I” to “we.” Charles Lindbergh’s first transatlantic flight, May 20, 1927, was one of those moments in 20th-century history when the entire world joined in celebrating a major human achievement — in this case an American achievement. Not much “we” in the world right now. Within two years, Weill, with additional music by Paul Hindemith, had set a text by Bertolt Brecht about this landmark event, as a half-hour-long cantata conceived for radio broadcast (another way to celebrate technological progress). Later in 1929, Weill replaced Hindemith’s sections with five new sections of his own. This version was finally published in 1982.
It’s a gem. The music is inventive and memorable, both ironic and haunting. Some of it echoes recent Weill: Lindbergh is introduced by a tango with a woozy clarinet solo out of Dreigroschenoper and Mahagonny (“My name is Charles Lindbergh. I was born in America” — in Lys Symonette’s effective English translation, which Hoose chose). The bass soloist tries to sing Lindbergh to sleep accompanied by a clarinet lullaby. A phantom fog (the chorus, in one of several roles), resenting the attempt to inhabit the sky, tries to obscure the pilot’s vision in a labyrinthine fugue. A later fugue, surrounding Lindbergh’s spoken expressions of determination (“I must arrive!”), recalls the solemn Masonic ritual in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. When Lindbergh sings to his plane, the vocal pauses are filled by the sinister yet hopeful rumble of the bass drum.
The Cantata Singers chorus and orchestra were in top form. And so were the soloists: bass-baritone Mark Andrew Cleveland narrating, baritone David Kravitz as the voice of New York City (together they have a funny scene as Scottish fishermen convinced that anything made out of iron or steel would fall into the water), and tenor William Hite as a heroic Lindbergh. Hoose built the piece to an inexorable climax.
The venue itself contributed to the excitement. This special fundraising benefit took place in a hangar at the non-profit Collings Foundation Aviation Museum out in picturesque Stow. Performers and audience were surrounded by planes from Bob Collings’s historic collection, among them a reconstruction of a Wright Brothers glider and an original Red Baron. (Collings also has an impressive collection of antique cars that includes one of the 470 Duesenbergs ever made and Al Capone’s Cadillac). The acoustics were clear and vibrant.
Der Lindberghflug was preceded by a set of seven of Weill’s American theater songs that I hope will be repeated when the Cantata Singers perform a “Kurt Weill Cabaret” at another outlying venue, the Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center, in Newton on April 6. The Boston premiere of Weill & Brecht’s brief 1929 “workers’ chorus,” Die Legende vom toten Soldaten (“The Legend of the Dead Soldier”), will be given November 9 at the Cantata Singers’ more familiar home base, Jordan Hall, on a program with Luigi Dallapiccola’s 1941 Canti di prigionia (“Prisoners’ Songs”) and Carl Orff’s 1937 (and still popular) Carmina Burana.
Richard Conrad’s the Bostonians presented an ambitious concert of Mahler songs at MIT’s small Killian Hall that deserved a larger audience than the 40 or so people it got. Two wonderful singers, mezzo-soprano Delores Ziegler, who now teaches at the New England Conservatory, and popular Boston baritone Philip Lima alternated in three song cycles and joined forces in selections from Mahler’s settings of folk poems, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”). John Greer, the head of NEC’s Opera Department, accompanied Ziegler; Lima’s collaborator was long-time Bostonians pianist William Merrill.
Lima is an imposing figure — well over six feet tall — whose voice didn’t always used to match his stature. But it’s been growing and blossoming and has acquired power. He opened the program with Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”), which some Mahler aficionados have regarded as an uncanny premonition of the death of Mahler’s own daughter, though Mahler wasn’t even married yet when he started on Friedrich Rückert’s poems about the loss of his own children. Lima sang with imposing tone and dignified restraint, but there’s more variety in this cycle than he, or his stiff body language, suggested. With his arms stuck to his side, he delivered all five songs in a state of near-catatonic grief. Yet the songs veer between the misguided joy of self-deception and the bitter irony of realizing the truth, and the cycle ends with a sense of unearthly peace and spiritual consolation. Lima’s musical phrasing seemed to reflect his physical inflexibility.
