The phrase "lost masterpiece" is often flung about indiscriminately, though every so often a work turns up that justifies its use. Kurt Weill's Royal Palace - a one-act opera to a text by the surrealist poet Iwan Goll, first performed in Berlin in 1927 - is a case in point. It was, literally, "lost" - the full score mysteriously vanished after a production in Essen in 1929, and was reconstructed by the American composer Gunther Schuller in 1971 (long after Weill's death in 1950) using the published vocal score. And it is, genuinely, a masterpiece. At the British premiere at the Barbican last year, everyone was knocked sideways. Now, by popular demand, the work is back.
A bittersweet, ambivalent erotic comedy, the opera's stance is inherently feminist. Dejanira, named after the murderous mythic wife of Hercules and ostensibly the ultimate femme fatale, appears at an Italian hotel with three blokes in tow, her husband and two lovers, symbolic figures who represent her gaudy past, her unhappy present and her potential future. As they squabble over her favours, she comes to recognise the constraining nature of male desire, abjures men and is finally turned into a mermaid, a creature at once alluring yet forever beyond the reach of human sexual contact.
Weill's score, comparably swivelling between past, present and future, constitutes an extraordinary farewell to Romanticism and a conscious examination of the multiple potentials of modernism. The protestations of the three lovers cue passages of Straussian opulence, Stravinskian ferocity and reined-in neo-classicism, before the work culminates in a hypnotic tango that points to the fusion of classical and popular elements that Weill uniquely made his own. It's music to die for, and Andrew Davis, who also conducted the Barbican premiere, sweeps you through it with tremendous relish and allure. Janice Watson, looking like some Hollywood screen siren, is, yet again, his shimmeringly sensual Dejanira.
This complete knock-out was preceded by two equally extraordinary experiences, Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra, which unfolded with kaleidoscopic beauty, and a performance of Rakhmaninov's First Piano Concerto, which pulled out every stop imaginable. The BBC Symphony Orchestra's sound was gorgeous in the extreme, while Leif Ove Andsnes played with a glamorous dexterity that brought the house down.
