Kurt Weill wrote very few solo songs, Lieder or chansons; nearly all his vocal music is intended to be performed within operas, musicals or other theatre pieces. Consequently most of it is scored for orchestral accompaniment: to extract the songs and perform them with piano, either in a performance-art format, as does Angelina Reaux, or as a Liederabend like Carole Farley, is to present a one-dimensional aspect of the music and an ultimate disservice to the composer.
''Stranger here myself'', the title taken from a number from One Touch of Venus (recorded by Teresa Stratas with the original orchestration on Elektra-Nonesuch (CD) 7559-79131-2, 12/88), is a tour de chant that Angelina Reaux has performed with success in New York and London. It's a sort of ''one-woman-against-the-world'' story, using basic stage props—a suitcase, bed, a few costumes. It all makes for an effective evening but on record Reaux's extra-vehement delivery, teetering on parody in the ''Alabama Song'', makes her version of this and several other numbers suitable only within the context of her show.
However, of all the opera singers who have tackled Weill recitals of late, she is potentially the best; she has the style, the diction and the voice. Her Rose in the Decca Street Scene (8/91) bears this out and here, after rather overdoing ''Surabaya-Johnny'', she ends it with a marvellously quiet, almost instrumental purity. The quieter she gets, the better she is. ''It never was you''—as an encore—is heartbreaking. Her pianist, Robert Kapilow, is augmented by the excellent accordion of William Schimmel and the rather too prominent percussion of Bill Royle. I would love to see Reaux on stage in one of the great Weill parts—''My ship'' is good enough to suggest that here, at last, perhaps, is the Liza Elliott we've been waiting for. The best track on the record is ''Nanna's Lied'', one of the few Brecht settings Weill composed in the USA, and intended to have piano accompaniment. This song was dedicated by Weill to Lotte Lenya for ''Weinachten 1939'' and she sang it at home for Brecht, but never in public, its dynamic range being really beyond her. Both Lemper and Stratas have recorded it, but Reaux stands comparison well.
Carole Farley is a seasoned performer, a famous Lulu and Hanna Glawari. The same strictures apply to her selection, despite the eloquent piano accompaniment of Roger Vignoles, who makes ''Speak Low'' especially insinuating. Nowhere on either record does it say what these piano reductions are—the composer's or another hand? If you listen to Weill's own recording of ''Speak Low'', singing and accompanying himself, the piano part sounds quite different. And in his records with Lenya (reissued on Capriccio (CD) 10 347) Weill makes much freer with the keyboard parts.
Farley brings a serious, concert-platform manner to the songs, she doesn't stick to soprano arias but includes some adaptations of choral numbers from Happy End and Berlin Requiem as well as Mrs Peachum's ''Ballade von der Sexuellen Horigkeit''. How Brecht would laugh to know that over 60 years after he wrote it, people were still being shocked by the words of the third stanza, and like his own creator, Rosa Valleti, refusing to sing them! I played six versions of this song as comparison, but the only singer on record who really 'gets' it is the veteran Trude Hesterberg on the 1958 Berlin recording. Weill devotees will be most interested by Carole Farley's inclusion of a song from the projected Huckleberry Finn that Weill was working on when he died, and two very early songs. Reiterlied with words by Herman Lons was written when Weill was 13, an essay in typical German song, vaguely in the style of Brahms, the later, more sophisticated Das schone Kind owes everything to Richard Strauss.
Both sopranos include the ravishing song ''Is it him, or is it me?'' from Love Life. There is a projected complete recording of this, which may help to tip the balance in favour of Weill as a theatre composer, rather than one whose songs are fast becoming the province only of the recitalist, whether on the concert platform or in a smoky cellar.'