Joana Mallwitz’s first recording for the yellow label is something of a triumph. The programme is generous and will hopefully entrench the Weill symphonies more firmly in the repertoire. Two of the three featured works date from the 1930s, showcasing what in happier circumstances might have been the composer’s mature ‘symphonic’ style. In the event he left European traditions behind, adapting successfully to the different demands of Broadway.

Older recordings of the First Symphony should probably be binned now that James Holmes has corrected ‘a host of incorrect pitches, dynamics, and blatant errors’. His critical edition was launched by Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic in 2021, fully 100 years after Weill drafted a student composition which still goes by several aliases, the title page having been lost during its wartime sojourn in a convent. HK Gruber and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra have already taken the cleaned-up score into the recording studio (BIS, 7/23). Mallwitz proves subtler and more purposeful, thanks in part to the fuller sonority of the ensemble she leads, the present-day incarnation of Kurt Sanderling’s (East) Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester. Weill’s argument does not always live up to his arresting opening and he would later turn his back on the Schoenbergian density of the writing. Be that as it may, Mallwitz has the knack of clarifying its textures without underplaying the emotional peaks. An ecstatic final climax is succeeded by a more ambivalent postscript. For the conductor, this remains affirmative, ‘as though Weill is trying to say: Peace will become possible when we firmly believe in it’.

When it comes to the Second Symphony, Mallwitz is not quite alone in including additional percussion in movements two and three – Antony Beaumont did so with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (Chandos, 3/07) – but only now with those (optional) parts incorporated into a further new critical edition are we invited to hear them as canonical. Weill supplied the tinkling and clatter at the behest of Bruno Walter, and some will argue that such frivolity blunts the acerbic classicism that Weill would seem to have developed out of the theoretical ideas of his teacher, Ferruccio Busoni. With no expressionist threads left to disentangle, DG’s sound team make sure we pick up on the contributions of triangle, gong and bass drum. Marin Alsop takes a memorably broad and Mahlerian view of the second movement in her woozily miked pairing of the symphonies (Naxos, 9/05). Gruber by contrast favours sharp rhythms and eccentric voicings, remaking the same Largo as a ‘funereal tango’. Mallwitz is comparably brisk yet never capricious, trumping all comers with a sense of symphonic momentum that does not preclude heartfelt lyricism. If the more colourful batterie sets her apart, what seals the deal is the nervous tension she invests in apparently accompanimental figuration, observing that ‘in Weill, even the smallest notes have teeth’. The finale has both poise and raw excitement. Mallwitz sums up the symphony as ‘dangerous music’ with ‘a feeling of melancholic beauty that might explode at any time’.

Placed between the two abstract pieces, Die sieben Todsünden (‘The Seven Deadly Sins’) is brought off with comparable deftness and élan. Here again there are competing notions of appropriate performance practice. By the time Lotte Lenya came to record this ‘sung ballet’ in 1956, her music had to be transposed down a fourth by the conductor Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg, a stratagem embraced by cabaret performers and ageing mezzos ever since. Mallwitz’s Anna 1 is Katharine Mehrling, the elegant singing actress and frequent Barrie Kosky collaborator. While her vocal instrument has a brighter timbre than that of the mature Lenya, the Prologue still gets under way at lowered pitch. Tiny lapses of intonation are not serious when the idiom is so well understood, the musical narrative kept airborne from the start. This is not something that could be said of Kent Nagano’s preamble for Teresa Stratas (Erato, 8/97), the slower pacing perhaps designed to suit Peter Sellars’s provocative visual conception. Not for the first time Anna 2 is not separately cast in Berlin: the two Annas may be construed as aspects of the same character and here their exchanges are ‘internalised’ without stereo separation.

As throughout this Weill project the sound is excellent, perhaps marginally more resonant than some will like. Accompanying notes include input from the conductor in dialogue with Holmes, perceptive stuff for all that textual matters remain unaddressed. Don’t be fooled by the cover photo’s Lydia Tár vibe. The supposed ‘antithesis of the antiquated image of the maestro’, Mallwitz has risen through the ranks in reassuringly traditional fashion; her previous commercial releases are of mainstream operas, most notably an audiovisual Così fan tutte from Salzburg (Erato, 6/21). Next from Berlin we are promised Haydn’s Die Schöpfung. The first woman to become chief conductor of one of the city’s major orchestras is plainly not be pigeonholed! This Weill collection, polished but never slick, merits the very strongest recommendation.