Just when you think it's safe to go back in the water, up pops Kurt Weill again like a hungry shark ready to drag you away. This event, however, was cause for some rejoicing, for in place of the faffing around with rarities that has dominated his centenary celebrations, we finally got his greatest music alongside works by Mozart and Schoenberg.
The Seven Deadly Sins, his last collaboration with Brecht, is a work of horrific compression, which tells us more about the human condition in half an hour than most of us would care to face in a lifetime.
Two sisters - alter egos, both called Anna - are sent by their revolting parents to earn the family fortune in the grim world of capitalist expansion that is 30s America. The seven sins are what Anna I, ever the practical realist, is prepared to exploit - but they also represent the emotions that the idealistic Anna II must choke back, with ghastly consequences, under the influence of her sister's systematic abuse.
Brecht and Weill envisioned the pair as being performed by a singer and an actress-dancer. Of late there's been a tendency for one performer to take both roles, and so it was here, with Anne Sofie Von Otter turning in one of the most unnerving accounts of the piece to be heard for some time. She avoided the brazen superbitch approach favoured by some interpreters. Instead, she took her cue from Brecht's line "We're not two people, just a single girl," and took us on a voyage through a hideous emotional maelstrom.
She started with vaunting self-confidence, but by the time we got to Anger, expressionistic slithers in her voice hinted at incipient disturbance, and when she reached envy, the final sin that destroys Anna II, the blanched tone, crazed expression and manic delivery indicated complete derangement.
It was a stunning performance, which she immediately followed with some of Weill's best Broadway numbers, including a version of Speak Low, which made me go weak at the knees.
The conductor, Joseph Swensen, made much of the score's savage irony and extravagant sleaziness. The Bremen Kammerphilharmonie, however, is a problematic ensemble, its reputation not quite justified on this outing. Their new music director is Daniel Harding, who on this occasion could be observed seated among the percussionists, bashing hell out of a tam tam when Weill's score requires it. The brass and woodwind are flamboyantly brilliant, but the string tone is thin.
This was fine for Weill's Deco punchiness and oddly bracing in the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni, but when we came to Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht, the dry sound and the occasional imprecision of detail robbed the score of much of its colour and most of its sensuality.
