Particularly in the United States, so many performances I’ve seen are sloppily sung and wrongheadedly staged, as though directors misread Brecht’s alienation theory essays as a recommendation to drain these works of their dramatic vitality and pleasure.
No audio recording of Kurt Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny has ever really worked for me, and it’s time that this be corrected (at least by the work’s centennial in 2030) to capture how Brecht himself described it, an opera that is fun! For an opera that I think has been done fairly compellingly in the past few years (both the Komische Oper and Deutsche Oper seem to have very promising productions now), any commercial recording features an imbalance that suggests its performers don’t quite understand what this work is: Koenig’s studio recording very much embraces Weil’s modernist elements but, along with Anja Silja’s colorless Jenny, fails to capture the thrilling mania of the principals; the Met’s honorable presentations in the late 70’s/80’s were competent, but the English text somehow made the opera appear clunky; and LA Opera’s performances reaffirmed to me at least that this work benefits from American musical theater performances as Les Vêpres Siciliennes would.
Other commercial video productions (Salzburg, Madrid, etc.) invariably suffer from similar issues such as singers who are either too long in the tooth to handle the music or are dramatically inert. It strikes me that this work is best handled by classically trained operatic singers who perhaps also have extensive experience in German operetta. So when will we get a recording that takes this modernist opera that is also a lot of fun?
