Composers are often not the best judges of their work, and where The Firebrand of Florence was concerned, Kurt Weill was a simple Döfchen (‘little dummy’, one of Lotte Lenya’s nicknames for him). In a letter to his parents, just after the show had been a monumental flop on Broadway in 1945, Weill referred to it as ‘an opera’ and considered it one of the best things he had done.

After the success of Lady in the Dark in 1940, Weill had been eager to collaborate with Ira Gershwin again. In 1944 they were both in Hollywood, working on Where Do We Go From Here?, and they teamed up with the playwright Edwin Justus Mayer to make a musical of his 1924 play The Firebrand. A comedy about the adventures of Benvenuto Cellini, it had already been made into a film, The Affairs of Cellini, starring Fredric March and Constance Bennett. Mayer failed to prune his text enough, and what emerged in New York was an overlong, unfunny, old-fashioned mish-mash of operetta, melodrama and low comedy.

The show has – understandably – never been revived, but for this concert performance Sam Brookes wrote a rhyming-couplet text to link the musical numbers. Weill was not making it up when he averred that some of it was really operatic; in particular, the opening scene, when Cellini is about to be hanged, is beautifully constructed with choruses and recitative framing Cellini’s song ‘Life, love and laughter’. This, and several other extracts, were recorded by Thomas Hampson on his ‘Kurt Weill on Broadway’ CD (EMI, 12/96), and it is something of a tribute to Rodney Gilfry to say that he doesn’t suffer by comparison. The problem with Act 1 is that the main love theme, ‘Love is my enemy’, is relentlessly plugged. It’s a good tune, but Weill had never before resorted to such obvious tricks.

Throughout the piece one waits – mostly in vain – for those trademark Weill touches in the orchestra; they are seldom there, since he allowed a professional arranger to do most of it. According to David Drew in his Kurt Weill Handbook (Faber: 1987), this was not due to pressure of time, nor failure of invention, but ‘a growing awareness of limits to the amount of purely musical substance he could hope to convey to a Broadway audience’.

The most famous song – because of Lenya’s recording – is ‘Sing me not a ballad’. Felicity Palmer is outstanding in this; of course, she ‘sings’ it much more than Lenya did, but she still gets across some of the classic Gershwin rhymes (‘I am not like Circe/Who showed men no Mercy’). Lori Ann Fuller, as Cellini’s model, the ‘divine Angela’, grabs her chance in the song about Cupid, ‘The little naked boy’, which is reprised as a duet with the Duchess. The best song in the score is one Weill and Gershwin had dropped from Lady in the Dark, ‘You have to do what you do do’, Cellini’s credo in which he defends his life as an artist.

The comic role of Allesandro the Wise is taken by George Dvorsky, and he is rewarded with some fine double entendres in the trio ‘A cozy nook’. Sir Andrew Davis conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Singers in a performance which brings out all the Hollywood qualities – it’s easy to hear that Weill and Gershwin had a movie contract in sight, but there were, perhaps thankfully, no takers (if he had gone back to Hollywood, we might never have had Street Scene and Love Life).

As for The Firebrand of Florence, it’s hard to believe that Weill didn’t sense, long before the show was complete, that it wouldn’t catch on. Simon Russell Beale speaks the narration well, but it’s going to be a case of the forward button on repeated listening. The recording is, of course, essential for Weill fanatics.