Dance to the Abyss is a show of music from the Weimar Republic currently on stage at Harbourfront Centre Theatre.  It’s given by Art of Time Ensemble as part of their 25th and final season.

It’s an interesting mix of instrumental and vocal music.  The first piece in the programme is Erwin Schulhoff’s Hot Sonate for Sax and Piano which is a four movement, heavily jazz piece influenced, expertly played by Andrew Burashko and Wallace Halladay (I think).  It’s followed by three pieces by the prolific Mischa Spoliansky.  There’s the atmospheric instrumental piece Sehnsucht and two songs sung by Patricia O’Callaghan in English translation; I Am a Vamp and L’heure Bleue.  The songs are pretty well known and fun and I liked O’Callaghan’s playful treatment of them.

And then to Dada.  Erwin Schulhoff’s Sonata rotica for Solo Female Voice was clearly designed “pour épater la bourgeoisie”.  Nowadays even a seasoned actor like Martha Burns amuses rather than shocks with simulated sex and pissing into a bowl.  The first half closes out with multiple renditions of Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher featuring all the instrumentalists.  The schtick here is that each repetition adds two or three of “Nazi Germany’s Dance Band Rules and Regulations” as remembered/formulated by Joseph Skvorecky.  A minor key jazz piece, heavy on saxophones, muted brass and percussion with a certain amount of scat singing emerges as a sort of palm court orchestra piece in a major key with saxophones replaced by strings, the scat eliminated, solos toned down or eliminated (the drums), the brass unmuted in proper Aryan style etc.  Amusing enough, if a bit long.  The Nazis had a point about drum solos though!

After the interval it’s Schulhoff’s Five Jazz Etudes for Piano.  Each of these virtuosic pieces riffs off a different song/dance style; Charleston, Blues, Chanson, Tango, except for the last Kitten on the Keys which evokes a cat running over a keyboard.  There’s some serious pianism from Burashko in this set.

And to conclude there’s five songs from the Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera in a slightly Americanised English translation.  A work I know as well as this one puts me in the same sort of space as the connoisseur in Farewell My Concubine who wants to know why the singer has only taken five steps rather than the customary seven in a particular scene!  Which is a fancy way of saying I’m going to nit pick.

I found the whole set nicely done but a bit too civilized.  In particular, John Millard’s delivery sounded as if it would be more at home in a 1950’s Ivy League student show than a Berlin nightclub.  Patricia O’Callaghan has her own way with these songs; especially something like Pirate Jenny, but I could use a bit more edge.  This was particularly marked in the extremely bitter How to Survive (weird translation that; What Keeps Mankind Alive is much more à point).  Bottom line I enjoyed the set but I prefer my Brecht to smell more of stale Turkish cigarette smoke and cheap Schnapps.

Dance to the Abyss can be seen again tonight (24th) at 8pm and tomorrow at 2pm so you’ll be able to make Evensong afterwards…