Word: weills
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HAPPY END (Columbia) is the puniest of the four small operas written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. While it lacks the dramatic and social force of Three penny Opera, it can nearly match its songs. The work has never been better performed than in this version. Lotte Lenya, Weill's widow and faithful interpreter, memorably croaks Surabaya Johnny, Bilbao-Song, and other dirges from the shadows...
Conductor Nino Sanzogno explained to his cast at Milan's Piccola Scala that the Italian premiere of Kurt Weill's Mahagonny would have to include some English lyrics: the bitter logic of Bertolt Brecht's libretto demands them. The cast did its best with a baffling array of polyglot lines ("Good morning, caro Signor Jack O'Brien!"), but when it came to singing "Worst of all, Benares is said to have been perished by an earthquake," the chorus sensibly defected. "Guarda qua Benares, è state messa giù da un terremoto," sang the mutineers, leaving American...
...such linguistic collisions did not deter a genteel, bejeweled audience from giving Mahagonny a 30-minute ovation, despite the opera's fiercely stated argument that all wealth is wicked. "Rich Italians now consider it very smart and refined to like Brecht and Weill," one critic humphed, and another suggested that all the fat cats clapped only to confuse spies from the tax collector's office. But the curtain calls had nothing to do with socialist realism. Instead, they were a tribute to Gloria Davy and Gloria Lane, two American singers who made Mahagonny a triumph in any tongue...
Ward died last year aged 76, and last week his stamps were sold for a record $1,100,000. The buyer was up-and-coming Stamp Dealer Raymond H. Weill, who seems intent on making New Orleans the new stamp capital of the U.S.; three months ago, he set a record by paying $78,400 for a two-stamp 1847 Mauritius cover. The Ward collection, now stashed in the silver vault of New Orleans' Whitney National Bank in 93 wooden boxes the size of whisky cases, will be broken up and sold piecemeal. Weill hopes to sell...
...KURT WEILL CABARET (MGM) faithfully captures the spirit of the year's best tribute to Weill and his collaborators. Folksinger Will Holt is passable, but Soprano Martha Schlamme (TIME, June 21) is passionately aware of each song's message, and her singing is a dulcet expression of irony, grief...