From Amazon.co.uk
Better known for the prickly avant-garde works of his later American career, Stepan Wolpe had a disreputable youth in the surrealist cabarets of Weimar Berlin, a time when everyone tried at least some of the time to write like Weill, Eisler or Hollander. The two longer pieces here--a vaudeville in which the god Zeus comes to Potsdam Square and tries to pick up a particularly laid-back whore, and a series of short sketches in which everything from knowledge to love to patriotism is shown as corrupted by lazy bourgeois thinking--are more effective theatrically than musically, being more spoken than sung, with accompaniment that is typical of a time and place as much entirely memorable. These are fine pieces which deserved rediscovery; the real find here though is the anti-war "Stimmen aus dem Massengrab" which is a fine piece of anguished protest-writing, bracketed with two fine little genre pieces in which Wolpe entirely gets into the spirit of his time. --
Roz Kaveney
See all 27 tracks on this disc
