LSO/Simon Rattle and Magdalena Kožená, Barbican Hall review: A whirlwind tour through the Seven Deadly Sins

By the time that trail-blazing duo of the Weimar Republic, Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht, collaborated on their final project, The Seven Deadly Sins, Hitler had come to power and the Jewish Weill and Marxist Brecht had both left Germany in haste. Their relationship had always been fractious, but by 1933 it was in terminal decline, Brecht threatening to kick “that phony Richard Strauss” down the stairs.

Weill was to come to terms with capitalist America more readily than Brecht, writing a series of popular musicals for Broadway with other collaborators. But in Seven Deadly Sins Brecht’s pen is still dripping with venom as he excoriates the continent’s sleazy, materialistic values, the biblical septet of vices here given a contemporary twist.

Magdalena Kožená, under the baton of her husband Simon Rattle, adroitly balanced the two sides of the singer–dancer, Anna, as she faces the ethical challenges of her round-trip from Louisiana and back again. The character’s impassioned allure alternated with her alter ego’s cynicism, but there was also fiery indignation at the degradation to which she is subjected.

The accompanying male-voice ensemble – Andrew Staples and Florian Boesch as Anna’s father and mother, with Alessandro Fisher and Ross Ramgobin as the brothers – provided a suitably pungent commentary. The momentum of the whirlwind tour was admirably projected by Rattle and the superb instrumentalists of the LSO.

The marginal softening of Weill’s sonorities in The Seven Deadly Sins, as compared with the Weimar scores, was highlighted by the fascinating selection of the first half. Typical of the late 1920s style was the Little Threepenny Music, a sequence made by Weill from his Threepenny Opera. Rattle opened with an overture of punched-out dissonances that seemed unduly laboured, followed by a smooth, lounge-style Mack the Knife hardly befitting the sharklike murderer and rapist. Thereafter, however, every number was delivered with impeccable precision.

If the Threepenny Opera shows Weill at his most acidly melodious, in Lonely House from the 1947 musical Street Scene, with its velvety strings, we hear him at his most unashamedly audience-friendly. Staples brought passion tinged with melancholy to the solo part.

An interesting curiosity was Death in the Forest, a nine-minute cantata created by Weill and Brecht in 1927 in which the poet’s trenchant critique of a decaying society is matched by the composer at his closest to the atonality of Schoenberg and the brittleness of Stravinsky. Boesch was the appropriately dark-hued bass-baritone.

Ending the first half were a pair of Weill’s Walt Whitman settings from the 1940s: Beat! Beat! Drums! and Dirge for Two Veterans. Tougher than the ingratiating musicals of the same period, these songs, sung here persuasively by Ramgobin and Staples respectively, nevertheless have moments of pathos and serenity.