VoxCarnyx

Old College Quad

A week after these Edinburgh Festival performances, Barrie Kosky and Katharine Mehrling take their Kurt Weill cabaret to the composer’s birthplace, Dessau, for the Kurt Weill Festival. The pianist, and musical director of the show, suggests – probably with just a little camp exaggeration – that this is akin to Daniel and the lions den. Professor Kosky’s thesis is that the German view of Weill is that he wrote nothing of worth after his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, and Lonely House is entirely composed of songs from the composer’s exile in Paris and then New York.

Clearly the Australian Intendant and Chief Director of the Komische Oper Berlin is comfortable and confident in his position there, and as the architect of a recent Threepenny Opera who is currently rehearsing The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, he is also enamoured of the Brecht/Weill catalogue. More to the point, perhaps, is that Germany is very familiar with Weimar-era Weill and he and his singer have a lot of material that will surprise and delight the composer’s home audience.

Those of us more familiar with Broadway Weill may also make discoveries in this programme, particularly among the Paris songs. Le grand Lustucru, Youkali, and Train du ciel are all from 1934’s Marie Galante, while Complainte de la Seine is a stand-alone from the same year, and all are much more than worth the archaeology, being fine additions to the canon. Mehrling, who is from a village near Frankfurt, is as relaxed and comfortable in French – and a noted interpreter of Edith Piaf repertoire – as she is in English.

To be plain, Katharine Mehrling is superb. The London-trained and Berlin-based actor and singer is a big name at home and should be an international star. Her superb voice and easy stage presence perhaps put a sheen on the work that is different from the edge other singers bring to Weill’s songs, but she is a very fine musician of great charisma.

More than that, she interprets a lyric beautifully, bringing fresh insight to the familiar September Song and Speak Low and making a captivating journey of a medley from 1941’s Lady in the Dark.

The boisterous presence onstage is Kosky, with his big, theatrical piano style and mission to educate as much as entertain. If ever an opera director embodied his production style, he is that chap, but he also knows real performing talent when he sees and hears it.

Keith Bruce