Recordings : The Kurt Weill File

On the 60th anniversary of his most popular work, “Die Dreigroschenoper,” Kurt Weill’s stock seems as high as at any time since his premature death in 1950.

The composer is the subject of a slick, informative quarterly publication, The Kurt Weill Newsletter (7 East 20th St., New York 10003-1106); a major record company, London Records, is about to launch a sizable Weill project featuring the German diseuse Ute Lemper and conductors John Mauceri and Herbert Kegel.

And, after several years, when the most one could hope for was a new “Dreigroschenoper” suite or an occasional song recital by the inimitable Teresa Stratas, the stores are filled with new recordings and compact-disc reissues of Weill’s music, including the classic collaborations with poet-playwright Bertolt Brecht in addition to material new to recordings.

In this context, a recent recording of the most extended and elaborate of the Weill-Brecht collaborations, “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny” (Capriccion 10 160/61--two compact discs), should stir the same kind of excitement that a new “Ring” generally induces in Wagnerites.

The recent issue, the first in stereo, at least highlights an artist born to communicate Brecht’s cool ironies--the German soprano Anja Silja, the former firebrand of Bayreuth.

Her light instrument still retains sufficient assurance, barring the curdled top notes, to do justice to the prostitute, Jenny Smith, one of the more memorable denizens of Brecht’s mythical American city where the only crime is poverty. Hearing the sweet cabaret harmonies of the “Alabama-Song” (Silja’s accented English is a delight) and “Wie man sich bettet,” sung in the original keys, affords manifold pleasures, as does the vigorous conducting of Jan-Latham Konig and the playing of the Kolnrundfunkorchester.

Their colleagues are not in the same league. Wolfgang Neumann, the Met’s erstwhile Siegfried, rasps his way through the nominal hero, Jim Mahoney, without providing much satisfaction, and Anny Schlemm’s manipulative widow Leokadja Begbick makes genuine singing less important than striking characterization, which it isn’t.

Brecht’s fascination with America became the impetus for the ballet with song, “Die Sieben Todsunden,” prepared for George Balanchine’s Les Ballets 1933 and revived by the choreographer with great reclame in the late 1950s.

In the vivid new CBS Masterworks recording (MK 44529), soprano Julia Migenes is the cynical, worldly-wise Anna I who guides her innocent sibling Anna II, through the seven moral fables that transpire in seven different American cities.

Again, hearing Anna performed without the almost traditional downward transposition of a fourth is a plus. But the vibrant Migenes errs by overinterpreting, nudging and caressing the vocal line, sabotaging Brecht’s delicious and requisite ambiguities. Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, and the East German artist Gisela May (on a deleted Deutsche Grammophon LP, badly in need of reissue) are the touchstones.

Michael Tilson Thomas’ conducting of the London Symphony and the contributions of the male quartet (tenors Robert Tear and Stuart Kale, baritone Alan Opie and bass Roderick Kennedy) give no cause for complaint. A sassy reading of the “Kleine Dreigroschenmusik” completes the package.

Though scarcely estimable on purely vocal terms, Lenya’s authoritative performances remain indispensable to the Weill file. CBS has likely provided the bargain of the year by reissuing most of the contents of two treasured 1950s LPs--”Berlin and American Theater Songs”--on a single compact disc (MK 42658). The refurbished mono masters yield such treasures as Lenya’s haunting “Speak Low” and sequences from “Lost in the Stars” and “Street Scene,” rendered in this artist’s irresistably ginny soprano.

For the compact-disc generation, CBS has also restored its original cast album of the 1947 “Street Scene” (MK 44668), which runs to less than half of this “American opera,” based on Elmer Rice’s slice-of-tenement-life tragedy. The operatically derived cast included Polyna Stoska, Brian Sullivan, Sydney Rainer and the young Anne Jeffreys, and they’re still a persuasive lot. But a complete “Street Scene” seems a pressing discographic project at the moment.

Steven Kimbrough, the American baritone who has specialized in 20th-Century esoterica, has filled some gaping holes with his song collection, “This is the Life” (Arabesque Z6579).

The compact disc is a bit skimpy, but it includes a handful of gems--three songs to Rilke poems (1921-23, Weill’s apprenticeship years with Busoni); “Im Volkston” and “Das Schone Kind,” drawn from the composer’s adolescence; “Walt Whitman Cycle,” and collaborations with Archibald Macleish, Alan Jay Lerner and Maxwell Anderson.

Kimbrough is a keen guide through this literature, while pianist Dalton Baldwin does nothing to belie his reputation as one of the finest accompanists around.