ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Kurt Weill Festival,
Dessau, February–March 2006

Reviewed by Michael Eagleton
posted 14 Feb 2007

Dessau , sixty-odd miles south west of Berlin in Sachsen-Anhalt, has not fared too well since the reunification of Germany , the population having declined steadily (by about 70,000 people, I am told) following the decline of local industry. In some suburbs, indeed, there are streets of empty dwellings. But things are now looking brighter: a huge new government environment agency is providing employment, and the authorities are pushing hard its credentials as a conference centre, with smart new hotels. More importantly, perhaps, the Bauhaus buildings have been spruced up and are attracting visitors, and the town’s famous son, Kurt Weill, is celebrated with an annual festival, though there is nothing to see – the Synagogue at which his father was Cantor was destroyed by the Nazis and the GDR did the same for his birthplace.

The 2006, fourteenth, Kurt Weill festival in Dessau followed the same pattern as its predecessors, a major new staging at the Anhaltisches Theater together with a range of smaller events in various other venues around the town. And since the theme of this year’s offerings was ‘Weill and Brecht’, it was inevitable that the new production should be Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny.

This is a theatre in which musical standards are high. The resident ensemble provided a good proportion of the cast: an excellent Jimmy Mahoney, South African-born Peter Roux, a strong lyrical tenor, as well as two of his three fellow Alaskans, and a pair of Trinity Moses (this role double cast), all more than adequate, and contributing to a real sense of ensemble. Among the guest singers, Begbick was sung by Waltraud Hoffman-Mucher, a trooper of a mezzo who did not have to characterise the role as some do with ugly half-sung notes (her over-the-top costume, à la Marie Lloyd, must have helped, though). Most interesting was the raunchy Jenny Hill of Stefanie Wüst: a Weill and Eisler specialist, she had the voice to sing the role as written while still evoking that Lenya smokiness – no mean achievement. Her biography in the programme book notes that she studied with Edith Mathis and Gisela May! Generalmusikdirektor Golo Berg conducted – no stranger to Kurt Weill, having already done Die Bürgschaft and Street Scene since his arrival in 2001, and his orchestra provided a model of punchy rhythm and charged banality.

Director Helmut Polixa and designer Stefan Rieckhoff seemed to view Mahagonny as a rather benign place, though the staging contained much fussy and sometimes irrelevant detail. Their city of sharks arrived ready-made in Begbick’s trailer – palm tree, tables and chairs with large white sunshades, all most elegantly gliding around on the revolve – it had all the atmosphere of a seaside holiday camp. But beyond its well-defined narrative, there was little indication of what the piece is really about; it was not until the Court scene in Act 3, for example, that any money changed hands. The citizens (except Jimmy) all wore a conforming colourful suited uniform topped with a red bowler hat. Although this gesture generated some dramatic, if clichéd, stage pictures, often these were spoilt by distracting background business. During the ‘ Alabama Song’ Jenny and her cohorts stripped an Adonis figure down to a fig leaf, and an irritating ice floe with polar bear slid into view at almost every recollection of Alaska . The best scenes, because they were so simply staged, came in the ‘moral’ sequence of Act 2, though here the rigorous structure of music and text was interrupted by the interpolation of the ‘ Crane’ duet, moved from its more apposite place in Act 3. But for the finale, instead of the menacing picket carrying parade which Brecht and Weill specified, the citizens were as usual merely lounging beneath their sunshades. Presumably they are there still. Mahagonny is a dark and disturbing piece; this was colourful, even chic, but ultimately too much in the comfort zone.

The Festival’s closing concert, also in the Anhaltisches Theater, was given by the MDR Symphony Orchestra under the French conductor Fabrice Bollon, the main item in the programme being Die sieben Todsünden. Before it came three non-Weill works with Brecht connections. Firstly, Paul Dessau’s In memoriam Bertolt Brecht, a gritty three-movement work dating from 1957, which celebrates his long friendship with Brecht by recalling the music he wrote for Mutter Courage when both were in exile in American in 1946. The performance was suitably austere. Next, in contrast, came four Brecht settings by Cristóbal Halffter, who in his early teens lived with his family in Berlin to escape the Franco regime, and later used his strict serialism to political end. The Brecht settings date from 1967 and were originally written for voice and two pianos, then orchestrated in a kaleidoscope of colour and texture. The singer here was Marisol Montalvo, whose astonishing technique made light of the obvious complexities of the score. Then came a further wild contrast in the shape of Hans Eisler’s Suite No. 3, culled from his music for Kuhle Wampe, the startlingly original film which Brecht and ‘co-operative’ released in 1932. Like Weill, Eisler used the dance-rhythms and wind-based sonorities which we associate with 1930s Berlin , but Eisler is perhaps rather crude where Weill is more sophisticated. Nevertheless, good to hear, and the somewhat rough and ready performance somehow seemed appropriate.

Weill’s Die sieben Todsünden could certainly have benefited from a little French polish in the orchestra. It was, after all, written for Paris and has a certain refinement, as does the Second Symphony written at the same time. But vocally it was a treat. The programme made it clear that we were to hear Brückner-Rüggeberg’s version which transposed the solo sections downwards for Lotte Lenya. Dessau ’s soloist was Helen Schneider, American-born but now German-based, a singer in the Ute Lemper mould, but with a more flexible instrument, more colour and a wider range of expression. Best of all, though, was the male ‘family’ quartet, four members of the Calmus Ensemble, a Leipzig-based close-harmony group. The advantages of such a group were immediately apparent: a cultivated blend of voices, so used to singing together that every etched consonant sounded precisely. Never have mother’s little yellow honey cakes sounded so delicious!

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