Weill: L’opéra de quat’sous
Comédie-Française; Chœur Passerelles; Le Balcon/Maxime Pascal
Alpha Classics ALPHA1015 81:55 mins
If your heart falls when you read that text and songs have ‘…undergone some cuts and numerous rearrangements… to better match the vision of Thomas Ostermeier….’, be not afraid. Der Dreigrochenoper, The Threepenny Opera and now the L’Opéra de Quat’sous has been evolving for nearly a century now, with Brecht himself still rearranging and rewriting in the 1940s. Thomas Ostermaier, the much-admired German theatre director, who speaks Brecht’s later narrations on this recording, in a voice that sounds as if it’s seen the inside of a good many whisky bars, is simply the most recent ‘author’.
What is different is a very French concern with prosody, a scrupulous matching of words to music which is not always the case in some performances. ‘The Cannon Song’ with Benjamin Laverhne as a swaggering Tiger Brown is properly explosive and although Marie Opera’s Polly is a touch underpowered in ‘Jenny’s Song’, her Act 2 number is sweetly disingenuous. Mrs Peachum – Véronique Vella – takes the ‘The Ballad of Sexual Obsession’ at a funereal pace – not so much le petit as le grand mort! – but the text is there even if the orchestrations are somewhat marred with insistent drumming by Le Balcon, as if a contemporary percussion ensemble had been layered over Weill’s sinuous dance rhythms and the Lutheran chorales. Oddly, Birane Ba’s Macheath is something of a cypher, but that is perhaps Ostermaier’s point.
The cast are all singing actors from the Comédie-Française, yet they are denied Brecht’s dialogue. Looking at the production stills in the accompanying CD booklet you do wonder if they missed a trick here. Perhaps it might have been better to release the recording as a DVD? Christopher Cook