Of Weill's Brecht collaborations of the late-1920s, the Berliner Requiem is the one hitherto most obviously lacking from the CD catalogue. That omission is now remedied by this impressive collection.
For all its concern with death, the Requiem is recognizably from the composer of Mahagonny, with spartan vocalization and pungent scoring leavened by rewarding melodies. The ''Ballade vom ertrunkenen Madchen'' (''Ballad of the drowned girl'') has been extracted from it for recordings by solo performers from Lotte Lenya to Ute Lemper. Unfortunately, Weill plundered the score and left it in an incomplete state, and it is performed here in the version arranged by David Drew in the 1960s. This omits Zu Potsdam unter den Eichen, which instead is heard separately as one of two unaccompanied male choruses, in which form Weill eventually published it. This hardly seems as satisfactory a solution as providing an instrumental accompaniment and including it in the Berliner Requiem as originally intended.
The point is highlighted by the other major constituent of this collection—the four Walt Whitman songs. These benefit hugely from orchestral garb, though the orchestration of the fourth of them is not by Weill. They surely represent the most impressive part of this collection, with inspired performances (in excellent English) by Wolfgang Holzmair outclassing the previous recording by Steven Kimbrough (Arabesque (CD) Z6579, 11/88).
The other works—the Recordare (1923) and Kiddush (1946) inhabit very different worlds. Both are meditative, religious works. The first, for unaccompanied mixed chorus, comes from the days when Weill was concerned with avant-garde austerity without the overtly popular touches, while the latter, for Jewish cantor, chorus and organ, is from his American period. Both are given sympathetic, capable performances, as everywhere else in the collection. Coming complete with printed texts, the whole most usefully fills gaps in the composer's CD representation.'