We think we know the milieu of Kurt Weill – whether the sardonic, witty, cynical and sometimes sentimental world of the Threepenny Opera and the City of Mahagonny, or the lush, sophisticated ballads of his American years. However, the new CD album from mezzo-soprano Katie Bray and her collaborators suggests a much more nuanced and complicated story.
Their launch event at Fidelio Cafe showcased a range of songs from all phases of Weill’s chameleon career – his early years of precocious success in Germany, including the classic collaborations with Brecht; his first period of exile in France (often overlooked); and his final contributions to the Great American Songbook. There was much material here, which if not exactly new, is certainly unfamiliar, including songs from the show he was working on at his death in 1950. There is also a wider emotional range than you might expect – songs of protest, plucky persistence, and regret, as much as hard-edged bitter-sweet satire.
At the heart of it all is the title song, Youkali, a melancholy, meandering tango evoking a world of dreams and desire where we locate our hopes for happiness even though it does not, cannot, indeed, exist in a life and epoch as mutable and unstable as Weill’s certainly was, and ours arguably is too. From Bray’s opening melismas on the stairs, through a variety of instrumental arrangements, and culminating in a full-throated unison conclusion it provided a convincing red thread, not just through the programme, but in unifying and making emotional and aeshetic sense of Weill’s shape-shifting career.
Bray’s status as a previous winner of the audience prize at Cardiff International Singer of the Year, speaks to her skills as a communicator, and she certainly puts across the songs here in a winning way, whether wry, witty or wistful. The reservations that sometimes occur in ‘cross-over’ projects between the worlds of opera and musical theatre certainly do not apply here. She inhabits this multi-faceted, often elusive music, clearly feels it with great inwardness, and, on the night, projected each song to the different levels of the venue with graded nuance and precision.
Her colleagues deserve a large share of credit too. We don’t hear the combination of voice, piano, accordion and double bass very often, but this concert and disc make a convincing case. Whether in solo meditations (Grainger especially soulful in his meditation on Youkali), or concerted reinforcement and elaboration of the vocal line, this combo provided distinctively different colours and moods for highly diverse material. Sometimes the chamber context gave you unique insights, for example, in the Overture to the Threepenny Opera where the quirky fugal lines emphasised, as Bray said, that this was as if Bach and Schoenberg had had a baby together.
It is impossible to single out more than a few highlights, but for me the revelations were in the French songs, where Youkali apart, Complainte de la Seine set out a memorable martial tableau of the glamorous and seamy sides of Paris; and in contrast J’attends un navire offered a stirring, torch-song climax that explained why this song was later adopted by the French Resistance. Of course it helped too that the accordion was omnipresent, with swoops and swoons to anchor us firmly to the Left Bank.
Fidelio Cafe provides an ideal location for this musical genre: not only does the intimate cabaret venue set the right vibe, but the wooden floors and split-level layout provide a suitably warm acoustic, framing the convivial yet informed atmosphere.
The newly released CD contains not only the items performed at the launch but several other Weill standards performed with the same subtle and supple blend of intensity and exquisitely poised legato line.
Fidelio Cafe
Performers: Katie Bray, Murray Grainger, Marianne Schofield, William Vann
9 January 2026
50 minutes