Kurt Weill’s collaborations with Bertolt Brecht in the late 1920s and early ’30s captured the angst, despair, and decadence of post-Weimar Germany with determined zest and ironic brilliance. These qualities, in turn, are mirrored in David Atherton’s landmark Deutsche Grammophon Weill recordings from the mid-1970s. The performances still retain their proficient sting and expressive ferocity. Atherton’s alert London Sinfonietta revels in the tart edge of Weill’s whiplash orchestrations, notwithstanding some rather tight-lipped shimmying in the Kleine Dreigroschenmusik. The British singers deliver Brecht’s lacerating texts in nearly perfect German, and are not afraid to get down and dirty when appropriate, especially throughout Happy End (shorn here of its famous “Bilbao Song”) and the Mahagonny Songspeil. Violinist Nona Liddell makes the best of a rather unidiomatic solo part in the composer’s early, Hindemithian concerto, and so does the vocal quartet in the strange, wordless Pantomime I.
