Literally Zeitgeist means 'time-ghost' but it
has come to signify the expression of a period of time. Art can transport you
backwards in time, and also to a particular place: think Pelléas, think Mahler,
think Elgar and, here and now, think Kurt Weill/Berlin/Die Dreigroschenoper.
Actually this ballad opera has performed the trick twice: firstly in 1728 with
The Beggar's Opera, the father of the genre of ballad-operas; and then, exactly
two hundred years later in Berlin, with text by Bertolt Brecht and music by
Kurt Weill (It also had another British life when it ran in Glastonbury and
then London for over two hundred performances in the Twenties).
Weill composed his music so that singing-actors
could perform. He scored it for a dance-band combo: cello, bass, flute,
clarinet, bassoon, trombone, percussion, keyboards, bandoneon, banjo and
mandoline, guitars, and pairs of saxes and trumpets. Vladimir Jurowski
conducted but couldn't keep his hands off the piano, sharing it with the always
excellent Catherine Edwards, first-class all of them, a superbly decadent
racket, more Cabaret then Cabaret. Choir and orchestra of the London
Philharmonic were on top-obviously-enjoying-themselves-form, bunched together
in a rhomboid, all span and spick in white and black. The soloists were
tip-top: Sir John Tomlinson/Peachum, gutsy and guttural, Felicity Palmer as
sleazy as all get-out, Mark Padmore/Macheath as smooth as a Comedian Harmonist
and what do you expect of a Jenny whose name is given in the programme book as
Meow Meow? Right, you got it.
We owe a lot to the conductor, Vladimir Jurowski;
this is his last season in Sussex where he has done wonders and as director of
the LPO where he has done consistently marvellous work and devised really interesting
programmes, as witness this Dreigroschenoper. Hey, Mister Jurowski, thank you and …. what
about bringing the whole lot of you to Glyndebourne to perform the opera on the
stage? (The hills would be alive with the sound of Kurt Weill).
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