Thomas Hampson - Kurt Weill on Broadway (CD)

All Music Guide

Just going by the title Kurt Weill on Broadway, one might expect to encounter certain songs from certain shows, for example, the title song from +Lost in the Stars and "September Song" from +Knickerbocker Holiday. Composer Kurt Weill's biggest hit show on Broadway was +One Touch of Venus, and when you consider that this album, although credited to opera singer Thomas Hampson, who is heard to one extent or another on all but two of the 16 tracks, is really something of a studio cast recording of selections from Weill musicals also featuring 21 other singers (notably Elizabeth Futral, Jerry Hadley, and Jeanne Lehman), you might expect to hear "Speak Low," "That's Him," and "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" from that show (even though they're sung by the female lead) and, perhaps, "Jenny" and "Tschaikowsky" from Weill's second biggest Broadway hit, +Lady in the Dark. You might even expect to hear a song or two from +The Threepenny Opera, which, even though it dates from Weill's early career in... Germany, has had several Broadway and offBroadway productions. But all such expectations should be banished; none of these songs is included. The title of this album really should be The Lost Songs of Kurt Weill on Broadway, or something like that, because it is in fact a reclamation project that looks to some of Weill's least successful shows and most obscure compositions. Forget about +Lady in the Dark and +Lost in the Stars, much less +The Threepenny Opera. This collection is devoted to music from shows like +The Firebrand of Florence (a 48performance flop) and +Johnny Johnson (68 performances), shows that never had cast albums. Neither did +Love Life, another show highlighted here, even though it ran a comparatively long 252 performances, if only because, as annotator Miles Kreuger points out, the year it opened on Broadway there was a strike of the musicians union that prevented anything from being recorded. Kreuger, in his extensive notes, provides much of the rationale for this album, claiming, for example, that +The Firebrand of Florence, an operetta with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and excerpts from which take up half the album's running time, "failed, not because of its writing or composition, but because almost everything that could go wrong with its original Broadway production went wrong," among those things that the show was "poorly directed, and four out of the four leading characters [were] poorly cast...." The annotator says nothing about the casting on this album; in fact, he says practically nothing at all about these recordings, restricting himself to historical comments about the original productions. Read more Less