Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 / Lady in the Dark – Symphonic Nocturne. Naxos 8.557481

• Composer: Kurt Weill
• Conductor: Marin Alsop
• Performed by: Marin Alsop, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

While he left an extensive and significant output of stage-works, the contribution of Kurt Weill to orchestral and instrumental genres was largely restricted to his formative years. The angular Symphony No. 1, completed in 1921, reflects something of the turmoil of post-World War I. In 1933, with Hitler in power, Weill escaped to Paris where he wrote Symphony No. 2, “one of the 20th century’s forgotten masterpieces”. The Symphonic Nocturne, adapted from the Broadway musical, Lady in the Dark, a 1940 collaboration between Weill, Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin, exhibits all the hallmarks of bitter-sweet lyricism of Weill’s theatrical works from his American years.

Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 / Lady in the Dark – Symphonic Nocturne Review

IF they haven't already, conductors looking for relatively unknown, audience-friendly orchestral music of quality might take a look at Kurt Weill's Second Symphony. It's part of a Weill disc from Naxos that includes the First Symphony and the “Symphonic Nocturne,” an instrumental suite based on the Broadway show “Lady in the Dark” as arranged by Robert Russell Bennett.

The American conductor Marin Alsop has stirred up news after her mixed reception as the next music director of the Baltimore Symphony. Britain, where she has been principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony since 2002, has been friendlier all along, greeting her with critical praise. The performances here are well organized, motivated and worth the trouble taken over them.

The Second Symphony, from 1934, incorporates the captivating directness that makes Weill's stage pieces work. His unhurried, marchlike relentlessness is on display. The impression is of a wordless anthem in celebration of an unspoken cause. We hear Weill's momentum even when it is in hiding or undergoing subtle rhythmic transformation, as in the pervasive rhythmic tic of the slow movement. By rights, music by itself cannot invoke politics or any social cause. Why, then, do we hear this stirring and determined music and long to pick up a flag and march alongside?

The First Symphony – sweaty, anxious and ambitious for bigness of sound and spirit – tells more about what Weill was in 1921 than about what he would become. Acid chords and anguished lyricism announce a young man's tribute to post-Romanticism. In the theater, Weill was to find a laconic, stripped-down sensibility; next to it, the music of this early piece sounds almost gluttonous.

A world and a lifetime away are the gentler curves and easygoing beauties of “Lady in the Dark,” from 1940, emblematic of a Central European's cou­rageous and total immersion in the musical styles of Broadway and its great composers of the 1930's. Bernard Holland – The New York Times