One of the strangest records of Kurt Weill’s music that I have ever listened to has just come my way.  There are two pieces involved; Propheten and Four Walt Whitman Songs.  Propheten has its roots in Weill’s six hour long, Old Testament inspired, opera The Eternal Road which premiered at the Manhattan Opera House in 1937 with a cast of 245 and which ran for 153 performances before, perhaps unsurprisingly, disappearing for a long,long time.  Propheten is a 1998 adaptation of the last act by David Drew using the original German text by Franz Werfel plus biblical quotations and additional orchestration by Noam Sheriff.  It basically deals with the sack of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and comes in at a more digestible 45 minutes.

Musically it’s quite odd.  There’s a lot of spoken text, quite a large cast and a large orchestra.  It sounds more like 19th century oratorio than any other Weill setting of German text that I’ve ever heard.  It was recorded live in Vienna in 1998 with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony, the Wiener Jeunesse Chor and a team of soloists and actors headed up by Albert Dohnen and Kurt Azesberger.  Dennis Russell Davies conducted.  It’s a very vivid and lifelike recording and the performances are uniformly excellent .  It makes a s good a case as could be made for the piece I think.

The Four Walt Whitman Songs belong to early in Weill’s new life in the USA.  They are settings of “Beat! Beat! Drums!”, “O Captain! My Captain!”, “Come Up From the Fields Father” and “Dirge for Two Veterans”.  So, like pretty much all Whitman poems, they are about Death.  The settings (for orchestra) are a bit weird.  “Beat! Beat! Drums! is appropriately somewhat martial but the other three are strangely cheerful and rather bland. “O Captain! My Captain!” sounds like it was written for a hotel palm court orchestra!  I really don’t get them at all.

The recording features Thomas Hampson and the same orchestra and conductor.  It was also recorded live though this time in the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg in 2001.  It’s another nicely vivid recording and, unsurprisingly, Hampson sings with great artistry.  There’s probably no-one alive who has gone deeper into settings of Whitman than Hampson.

The recording is available as a standard res CD and as MP3, standard res and 48kHz/24 bit FLAC.  There’s a very good booklet but it appears not to be available in digital form.  I listened to the hi-res version and had a pre-press mock up of the booklet.

This is a really odd release.  It’s very well done but the music just doesn’t do it for me.  For Weill completists or the curious I think.

Catalogue number: Capriccio C5500