It is fitting that two new recordings of Weill and Brecht's ballet chante should be issued in this year of the sixtieth anniversary of its first performance in Paris in 1933. Written in much haste, just after their flight from Hitler's Germany, it was their last major collaboration, and seems to have reunited them in the ideal partnership which had produced Die Dreigroschenoper five years earlier.
Although in recent years The Seven Deadly Sins has become increasingly performed as a concert work, it is a theatre piece, and one to be danced as well as sung. The question of its interpretation will always be bound up with the memory of Lotte Lenya, who created the role of Anna I and who, 25 years later, was the first to record it. In between it had been entirely forgotten until Georges Balanchine, who had choreographed the premiere, revived it at the New York City Ballet, in English as The Seven Deadly Sins, with Lenya in her original role. Then, her voice having deepened, she transposed her part into a lower tessitura, and most subsequent performers have used this version. Simon Rattle's 1983 recording was the first to revert to Weill's original scoring. In fact the role is not that high, the singer seldom having to go above the stave.
Brigitte Fassbaender is the first great Lieder singer to record it, the others have all been singing actresses or opera stars; her performance is stupendous—one of the best things she has ever done on disc. How wonderful it would be if she could be persuaded to undertake it on stage (it is 20 years since it was seen at Covent Garden, in Macmillan's choreography, with Lynn Seymour and Georgia Brown). Fassbaender, like Elise Ross with Rattle, takes it in the original keys, and her marvellous diction and never over-stressed acting, weaving in and out of Sprechgesang without departing from the vocal line or losing the rhythm of the piece puts her at the forefront of Weill singers. Of course she sounds rather aristocratic compared with the knowing street-singer style adapted by Lemper on Decca, but just compare her in ''Lust'', the very heart of the work, and marvel at the detail she extracts from both text and music.
The rest of Fassbaender's disc is a judiciously chosen selection of Weill songs, all of which have some bearing on The Seven Deadly Sins. The Complainte de la Seine is one of the chansons Weill wrote in Paris that same year—it opens with a direct echo from the last section of the ballet; Youkali is the tango from Marie Galante, Weill's only major work for the stage in French, written the following year and Es regnet was composed to a text improvised by Jean Cocteau. Fassbaender is superb in this, as well as the German-language version of another chanson, Je ne t'aime pas—revised when Weill was in America as Wie lange noch?, a direct response to the rise of a resistance to the Nazis within Germany during the war. Berlin im Licht ends the disc as a reminder of an earlier, less tragic time, ''To see the city of Berlin the sun isn't enough''.
Cord Garben's conducting, and the soloists in the male quartet, are fine, but compared with Rattle's interpretation, the pacing sounds a bit pedestrian. I cannot, however, imagine a dancer being able to keep up with Rattle's frantic speed in the Schneller Walzer section of ''Pride''. Elise Ross's performance has been generally underrated, her singing is full of interesting detail, but inevitably she sounds pale compared with Fassbaender. If the companion piece is of especial concern, Rattle's Pulcinella is a very appropriate choice, as another ballet chante created for Paris, and is a fine recording.
Like Mauceri with Ute Lemper on Decca, the Capriccio disc pairs Die Sieben Todsunden with the Mahagonny Songspiel. If encountered in the theatre or concert-hall, these performances would seem most enjoyable, but the competition on disc is so stiff—there is also an excellent version by Julia Migenes with Michael Tilson Thomas and the LSO which has the Dreigroschenmusik suite as a fill-up—that this is not really to be considered as a front-runner. Doris Bierett is a diseuse in the Brechtian tradition—not as subtle as Gisela May on DG, whose partners included Peter Schreier (8/68—nla).
Connoisseurs of Weill-style will perhaps think that seven recordings of Die Sieben Todsunden is more than enough—but be warned there are three more on the way (Silja/Dohnanyi, von Otter/Gardiner and Stratas/Nagano).'