Conductor Simon Rattle is a long-time devotee of Kurt Weill, and this idiomatically performed album derives from a live concert given in 2022. At its heart is a probing account of Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins, a “sung ballet” dating from 1933 marking the composer’s last major collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená (Rattle’s wife) is vividly characterful as Anna, a young woman sent forth by her American family to earn money for “a little house on the Mississippi”. Instead she meets the temptations of materialism, and Rattle is particularly well attuned to the lurking undertow of world-weariness beneath the snappy surface attractions of Weill’s music.
Rattle finds similar ambivalence in the instrumental Little Threepenny Music, and plumbs the darker side of Weill in a gripping account of the short cantata Death in the Forest, where bass-baritone Florian Boesch is the soloist.
