Saturday night Confluence presented a concert curated by Patricia O’Callaghan of a selection of works by Kurt Weill.  Now I have.a bit of a love/hate relationship with Weill which will likely colour this review.  Broadly speaking I love his earlier work, especially the collaborations with Brecht, but I’m just not into the Broadway stuff at all with a few exceptions such as Street Scene which has at least a bit of an edge.  I also thoroughly dislike some of the American translations of the Brecht pieces that do all they can to take the edge off.

That said, on Saturday a representative sample of works from throughout his career got very good performances in arrangements by members of the ensemble so if you like works like Knickerbocker Holiday as much as, say, Die Dreigroschenoper it would be just your thing.  Interestingly, this concert did include a couple of pieces from Weill’s  American days that suggest that the Broadway path was not inevitable.  Alex Samaras sang the very interesting “And where is the one who will mourn for me” from Down in the Valley and “Dirge for two veterans” from Four Walt Whitman Songs; obviously “American” but equally obviously not Broadway.

But we did get plenty of the early stuff.Alex Samaras and John Millard produced a suitably martial version of the “Cannon Song” (in a slightly bowdlerized translation) and, best of all, we got Patricia herself singing “Pirate Jenny” (in a mixture of English and German) and “Lust” from The Seven Deadly Sins.  IMO Patricia O’Callaghan is as good an interpreter of this material as anyone around so it was a treat.  There was a very decent “Bilbao Song” from John Millard too.  Plus more of the Broadway material to make up about an hour and a quarter of songs.

Accompaniment was from the excellent and idiomatic Yolanda Tapia on piano, Andrew Downey on bass, Aidan McConnell on drums, Larry Beckwith on violin and the ubiquitous Drew Jurecka on violin, bandoleon and saxophone.

There’s another chance to catch this programme this afternoon (Sunday) at Heliconian Hall.