Classical music: Threepenny Opera | Barbican | Kurt Weill | 1920s Berlin | Bertolt Brecht | marxist leanings | Klangforum Wien

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The Review - CLASSICAL & JAZZ
Published: 18 June 2009

Weill's take on knives and war

REVIEW: THREEPENNY OPERA
Barbican

IT may have been presented a satirical view of the politically charged and hedonistic atmosphere of 1920s Berlin when it was written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in 1928.
But The Threepenny Opera is just as relevant in London today as it was in Berlin more than 80 years ago.
Indeed, the references are disturbing: boys killed with knives; dead bodies lying in the street; marauding gangs; young women being trafficked, forced through poverty into a life of prostitution.
Marxist leanings and anarchic tendencies are central to the Weill/Brecht satirical text. Yet it is Weill’s haunting music, with its unforgettable melodies, that bring a sense of reality to political references that would otherwise be meandering slogans.
The symphonic treasures of the music played by a 10-piece jazz/gypsy band were placed at the centre of a masterful production by Klangforum Wien. The production – which was put together by HK Gruber, the maverick Austrian conductor-composer – gained greatly from a stellar cast of singers including Ian Bostridge as gangleader Macheath, or Mac the Knife as the role is better known.
His great solo spelt out Macheath’s evil intentions in a spine-chilling way, strikingly different to the sanitised, saccharine Mac the Knife renderings by the likes of Frank Sinatra.

REVIEW: JOHNNY JOHNSON
Baylis Theatre

The first piece by Kurt Weill after his emigration to the United States is very different from The Threepenny Opera.
First performed in 1936, Johnny Johnson is really a work by playwright Paul Green interspersed by delightful Weill songs.
It is an anti-war piece looking at the 1917 slaughters in the trenches through a mid-1930s
lens.
Its first performance in this country took place on Sunday at the Lilian
Bayliss Theatre, Sadler’s Wells, in a semi-staged production by Lost Musicals directed by Ian Marshall Fisher, the Belzise Park impresario specialising in neglected American musicals.
The production is a veritable merry-go-round, 14 actors playing nearly 50 parts.
Max Gold, an actor who also teaches drama at Holloway School, excelled as Johnny Johnson.
The production is for those with an interest in early American musicals and in Kurt Weill music.
• Johnny Johnson is at the The Lilian Bayliss Theatre (Sadler’s Wells), Rosebery Avenue, EC1, Sundays June 21, 28, July 5, and 12. 4pm 0844 412 4304
£21-27.50

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