Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill

When I was a student in 1965, the turntable in my college apartment was kept busy spinning The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Broadway show cast albums, Nina Simone and Lotte Lenya. Lotte Lenya? Yes, the widow of German composer Kurt Weill and the star of the legendary 1950s off-Broadway revival of THE THREEPENNY OPERA, who also played James Bond's adversary Rosa Kleb in the movie FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. (Rosa Kleb was a martial arts expert with poison knives in the toes of her shoes.) But my theory is that Lotte Lenya enjoyed great cachet with the baby-boomers primarily because of the cover of Bob Dylan's 1965 "Bringing It All Back Home" album. That cover shows Dylan and a brunette woman in a rather elegant setting crammed with books and phonograph records. Prominent among the stack of recordings is Lenya's "Berlin Theatre Songs of Kurt Weill" album. Even though this was the age of "Don't trust anyone over thirty," if Bob Dylan liked Lotte Lenya, then she was okay. I loved everything about her Berlin Theatre Songs album, from the expressionistic cover portrait to all the unfamiliar songs sung in quavery German.

Now that CDs have made phonograph records obsolete, I've wanted to replace my LP version of the Berlin Theatre Songs for some time. Well, I feel that I've hit the jackpot with this Masterworks Heritage CD reissue which is packaged with the Brecht-Weill THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS, an experimental dance-drama that Brecht and Weill created in Paris after fleeing Nazi Germany. I had never heard THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS. It is a revelation. It could have been written by no one else. The haunting melodies, the offbeat orchestrations and the unorthodox subject matter combine to form a Brecht-Weill classic. I love this music and have played it repeatedly for weeks. Lenya's voice during this period had not yet become raspy and her saucy personality shines through. My German is much better now than it was as a college student and I can at last appreciate Lenya's perfectly enunciated German. I find this recording mesmerizing. The CD is packaged as a foldout album/book, rather than a jewel box. It includes a brief essay by Teresa Stratas and helpful notes by Mario R. Mercado. Also included are more than a dozen sepia-toned photos of the recording session and four beautiful color photographs of Lenya in Hamburg in 1956. And of course, that wonderful Saul Bolasni portrait that graced the original LP is included on the inside cover of the jacket.

I think this CD is essential. For me, it conjures up a whole era, maybe a whole century. Five stars.

'Lotte Lenya sings Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins and Berlin Theatre Songs' is a single CD combining two separate 1955 LPs recorded in Germany, five years after the death of husband and composer, Kurt Weill.

As a lifelong Weill fan who has heard many different interpretations of these songs most notably from Ute Lemper and Teresa Stratas, I was struck by how dramaticly better was Lenya's performance of the lyrics. I think this goes far beyond the fact that many of these works were written specifically to be performed by Lenya in Berlin between 1927 and 1933. It is obvious to my ear that even though Lemper is a great cabaret singer, Lenya trumps this with years of performing on the live stage without the aid of electronic amplification.

Lenya does 'Die Sieben Todsunden' with the version done for a lower voice (same as Lemper) rewritten for her by Weill. As other reviewers have noted, this was originally a combination ballet / song cycle commissioned in Germany by George Balanchine where the singer and the ballerina perform two sisters, both named Anna.

None of the individual songs are nearly as popular on their own as the following collection of songs from the German works, 'The Threepenny Opera', 'Mahagonny', and 'Happy End'.

My first encounter with Lotty Lenya's singing was on a Columbia collection done on vinyl in the 1960s, done, probably following on her appearance in the second James Bond movie, 'From Russia, With Love' as the Russian Colonel Klebb. I think this recording is far superior to that issue or to any other recent recording where Lenya does songs she never performed on the stage.

A few weeks ago I ran into this album in a corner store, and, not knowing what to expect, bought the CD for the heck of it. Admittedly, Lotte's style takes some getting used to, but once you do, she's one of a kind. It's as if her voice vibrates with the essence of life itself, and every time I play her I discover new aspects of her interpretation. I only wish the Heritage vocal series would release more of her remastered performences.

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