Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, ENO, 16 February 2026

Coliseum

Images: Tristram Kenton

Announcer – The Company
Leokadja Begbick – Rosie Aldridge
Fatty the Bookkeeper – Mark Le Brocq
Trinity Moses – Kenneth Kellogg
Jenny Smith – Danielle de Niese
Jimmy MacIntyre – Simon O‘Neill
Jack O’Brien – Elgan Llŷr Thomas
Bank-Account Billy – Alex Otterburn
Alaska Wolf Joe – David Shipley
Jenny’s Girls – Joanna Appleby, Deborah Davison, Sophie Goldrick, Ella Kirkpatrick, Claire Mitcher, Susanna Tudor-Thomas
Jenny’s Boy, A Cloud – Damon Gould
Jenny’s Boy, A Typhoon – Adam Taylor
Toby Higgins – Zwakele Tshabalala

Director – Jamie Manton
Designs – Milla Clarke
Lighting – D.M. Wood
Choreography – Lizzi Gee, Spencer Darlaston-Jones
Sound design – Jake Moore
Intimacy and fight coordinator – Haruka Kuroda

Chorus and Additional Chorus of the English National Opera (director: Matthew Quinn) 

Orchestra of the English National Opera

André de Ridder (conductor)

In Berlin’s Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof, one of my favourite cemeteries, Hegel lies buried—as, very close, do Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, as do many others. Brecht’s Chausseestrasse house and the room in which he worked overlooked that cemetery; the Marxist Brecht expressly chose it out of increasing fascination with Marx’s single most important intellectual forerunner, GWF Hegel. One summer, I lived ten minutes’ walk away and visited regularly. Karl Marx, of course, lies in another celebrated cemetery, in another great world city: Highgate in London, further from anywhere in London I have lived, yet not so far in the greater scheme of things. This tale of ‘my’ two cities, of two cemeteries, of three dead men and more – ‘Nothing you can do will help a dead man’ – shaped my experience of this new ENO production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, not least since I had seen Mahagonny only two months previously, in Berlin, in Barrie Kosky’s Komische Oper staging. 

In capitalist society as in its artistic production, then as now, the grit lies in contradiction. What Hegel the divined as ontology, Marx situated in particular social and economic conditions. We are not obliged to choose; both indeed may be true or at least contain truth. In any case, following in both Hegel and Marx’s wake, Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny offers an illuminating instantiation of some of these contradictions: not only in subject matter but in aesthetics and its implications for performance and reception. Some art fails because it simply is not very good, or at least is not well presented. The contradictions here, though, are of a different nature, not to be smoothed over, concealed, or reconciled, but to be such stuff as dreams are smashed on—as indeed is patently the case wherever we look in our present social and political predicaments. No wonder, then, that this new ENO production, the last, I believe, before the company’s move to Manchester, is replete with more general resonance than those personal, albeit connected elements with which I began. 

The contradiction between advertisement and reality is key to the Mahagonny and the Mahagonny we visit with Jamie Manton and his team, yet so is the form of production we can all see – and hear – if only we open our eyes and ears. In the ‘real’ world, ideology mystifies, obscures, yet never quite conceals; here, contradiction is perhaps more glaring, but that is the (Brechtian) point. It all goes back to a lorry, a box of theatrical tricks. (In what I think is pure coincidence, it put me a little in mind of the van in Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth Ring, though vehicular function may hold something in common.) Great claims are made for the city the unholy trio – less a trinity than in Kosky’s staging with c.1930 religious symbols – have built. Perceived desire and demand play their part, whether for whiskey or women—and, in a welcome update, men too. Sex workers rather than prostitutes, Jenny’s girls and boys are available to all, though the outcome does not change. Any declaration of love is not necessarily entirely hollow, but its truth is fleeting and contradicted by the destructive self-interest of all (save, perhaps, the founding mother and fathers). Even the whiskey is diluted by grim recycling that suggests what comes out one end will go back in the other. 

But it is not all grime and grimness: there would be no contradiction then. There is Weill, of course, on whom more soon, but there is also a lively sense of fun, of entertainment: not necessarily unmediated, but what is? There are plenty of witty moments to occasion a wry smile or more, whilst the framing – the Coliseum’s staging and technical equipment a container for, in turn, the container – reminds us this is theatre. Announcements are made by alternating members of the company, part Brechtian remnant with loudspeaker, part Handmaid’s Tale entertainment imitation. (Before the interval, that is; after, they are more clearly themselves, unmasked.) And whilst the production in general shies away from specific contemporary reference – we can hardly fail to make it – the trial as gameshow surely gives the Trumpian game away. Resourceful designs impart a sense both of using what was to hand and also of what one might see, or have seen, at the Berliner Ensemble. In the contradiction between expectation and reality, a weathervane (we have plenty of them in our world) tapdancing hurricane points the way to just destruction of the city, only suddenly to change direction in a triumph of the knowingly underwhelming that prefigures God’s forlorn, defeated attempt to visit justice on this world at the end, drawn out Weill’s Bachian chorales bleakly yet thrillingly subverting Christian passion. Likewise, a cloud dances in counterpoint to Weill’s delicious parody of overwrought, out-of-tune Romantic salon music, edging out Jimmy’s act in more ways than one. 

For the tension and indeed contradiction between Brecht and Weill will, should always lie at the heart of this work and its performance. Can, should music do what Brecht seems to imply it should? Where does that leave the songs, the tunes, the band? André de Ridder, music director designate, drew out biting and seductive playing from the ENO Orchestra. One could sympathise with Jimmy on his last night, traduced and betrayed, as for once strings soared, but not too much—and then it was over. Structurally, closed forms – how they do (and do not) add up to more – were clear and did far more than reproduce those of the libretto. It can be all too easy hearing Weill in the twenty-first century to succumb to nostalgia for a ‘Weimar’ that never was. Here, edge was maintained without entirely denying us pleasure; banjo and Hawaiian guitar could be heard amidst ominous, bass-led hemming in. If only Jeremy Sams’s translation could have decided what it wanted to be and stuck with it, much would have bitten still more savagely. Much was good, but there were too many instances that simply jarred, and the crucial Biblical element to Brecht’s writing was too often lost. 

One less productive contradiction, at least for me, lay between operatic voices and miking. The Coliseum has never offered an ideal acoustic for opera, but here balances were too often awry. The chorus suffered more than most, words sometimes more or less inaudible. Rosie Aldridge and Danielle de Niese offered nicely contrasting and complementing female leads, equally at home in more operatic moments and something closer to the street, both fine singing actors. Simon O’Neill proved a tireless Jimmy, ably supported by his friends, Alex Otterburn, Elgan Llŷr Thomas, and David Shipley. Alongside Kenneth Kellogg and Mark Le Brocq, all offered individual performances founded on the text and on a recognition that the text has contradictions of its own, not least between words and music. Ultimately, I found there was in all respects no need to choose: Berlin and London offered different experiences, in contrast, complement, and yes, contradiction. In some ways, the latter, perhaps ironically, seemed the more Brechtian in its reluctance – refusal would be too strong – to concede to opera, even in Weill’s idiosyncratic conception. It was, in any way, a properly barbed, defiant way for ENO to bid us au revoir. 

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Komische Oper, 13 December 2025

Schillertheater

Images: Iko Freese/drama-berlin.de

Leokadja Begbick – Ariana Lucas
Fatty the Bookkeeper – Ivan Turšić
Trinity Moses – Seth Carico
Jenny – Nadja Mchantaf
Jim Mahoney – Gerard Schneider
Jack O’Brien – Caspar Krieger
Bank-Account Bill – Hubert Zapiór
Alaskawolfjoe – Philipp Meierhöfer
Toby Higgins – Thoma Jaron-Wutz
Stage piano – Rui Rodrigues

Director – Barrie Kosky
Revival director – Katharina Fritsch
Set designs and lighting – Klaus Grünberg
Assistant set designer – Anne Kuhn
Costumes – Klaus Bruns
Dramaturgy – Maximilian Hagemeyer

Chorus of the Komische Oper Berlin (director: Jean-Christophe Charron)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin

Alexander Joel (conductor)

How do you like your Brecht? Or your Weill? Or your Brecht-Weill? Banal questions, doubtless, though that is not to say that nothing can come from them, just as with ‘Aimez-vous Brahms’? There is, though, a particularly strong case to say that however one does, one should not receive what one wants, that to do so, to settle back into ritual, comfortable nostalgia is still more than usually to miss the point. That is certainly nothing so banal as merely ‘épater les bourgeois’, though if we are honest, that will rarely be the worst of things, albeit never enough. 

Berlin, of course, has (had) traditions of its own in this respect, not least from the Berliner Ensemble, founded by Brecht and Helene Weigel: if not quite an anti-Bayreuth, then in something of a dialectical relationship to the Festival. They are not the only traditions; can often be misunderstood; and even where not, have no intrinsic right to be maintained; they will continue in any case to haunt performances, reception, and understanding. If the Theater am Schiffbauerdam, home to the Ensemble for all but the first five years of its existence, is even now most renowned for the 1928 premiere of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, yet also for the 1931 triumph of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, there remains the shadow of the notorious Leipzig premiere of the latter the previous year, disrupted by Nazi thugs who would proceed to ban ‘degenerate’ Brecht and Weill all too soon thereafter. The BE continues to present a broadly Brechtian, if increasingly varied, approach to theatre; indeed, Barrie Kosky’s Threepenny Opera premiered there in 2021, the same pandemic year that his staging of Mahagonny was first given about a mile away at the Komische Oper. It is now revived, during that building’s closure for renovation a little further away, at the Schillertheater—home to a good few spectres of its own. Both theatrically and musically, we inevitably feel some of their haunting, whether that be the intention or no, just as the text of Brecht and Weill (and Elisabeth Hauptmann) invites in and/or fails to repel guests as different as Christ, Luther, Bach, Marx, and, yes, Wagner and Schoenberg—often in tandem with dialectical antagonists—as well as Brecht and Weill themselves in earlier guise. Moreover, if it would make no sense, long after Brecht, Weigel, and indeed Ruth Berghaus and Joachim Herz (director of the Komische Oper’s first, 1977 production), to insist on some outdated Neue Sachlichkeit opposition to Wagner, perhaps even to Wagnerism, such negative, ‘anti’ ghosts will never die completely, nor should they. The present, a different present even from 2021, naturally makes its presence, as it were, felt too—often uneasily, as it should be. 

I do not think it was only on account of my finding eyes and ears, though maybe it was, that performance and production seemed to come a little from the past, real and imagined, in the first half and most strongly to come together, suggesting something new that was yet also a little old, after the interval. Kosky’s production certainly seemed to have its roots most clearly in a Berliner Ensemble lying somewhere between its (mis-?)remembered past and its present earlier on: not in a bad way by any means, but situating itself in a broadly post-Brechtian dramaturgy, knowing cliché and all, that set parameters for our response, all the better for certain surprises – alienating, if you like – to register later on. It took us lightly yet surely, then, on a little walk through imagined Mahagonnys, imagined Berlins, imagined dramatic histories, rather as our three initial protagonists fleeing from their previous home, had taken their leave from their previous city to journey to find their new one. 

If it is clear from the outset who (and what) Widow Begbick is, Trinity Moses and Fatty the Bookkeeper are initially presented, though surely only presented, as Christian and Jew, their dialogue somehow tending a little towards Beckett, whilst remaining the same as it has always been. It had me recall Kosky’s Bayreuth Meistersinger exchanges between Sachs and Beckmesser, especially as realised in the acting of Michael Volle and Johannes Martin Kränzle, that staging for better or worse also preoccupied, rather more controversially, with the 1930s. And indeed, here Seth Carico and Ivan Turšić also worked very well together, their characters coming ever more sharply into focus as the work progressed, whilst maintaining a certain dialectical relationship that also of course encompassed Ariana Lucas, a properly larger-than-life Begbick, at the apex or nadir of its unholy trinity. 

Work and city founded and in (im-)proper working order, a fantastic, typically Kosky ‘show’ experienced following a hurricane both ominous, almost Romantically so, and yet also knowingly, modernistically constructed, the true Weimar Passion (even passion) can emerge—with irony, doubtless, yet also on occasion without. Kosky’s conception of ‘an anti-Tristan und Isolde’ here is interesting, because, inclinations, dramaturgy, performing practices notwithstanding, a little can seep in and arguably must, to be ‘anti-’ in the first place. Ask Nietzsche, Adorno, or Stravinsky. Walls close in and open up, but is it, can it be, any more than an illusion, a delusion, when they do it with mirrors? Descended from Bach’s multivalent chorus as well as the Greeks’, and with all the layers of meaning that might entail, the crowd and thus the city seem larger than they are, but they still, fractious sheep that they be, need to be convinced, corralled, and implicated as individuals. They sing – often surprisingly slowly, echoing the Bach of yesteryear – their chorales but they also act as the Jews of the turba choruses, called upon each in turn to participate in the death sentence visited on Jim Mahoney for his ultimate, unforgivable, Mahagonny-blasphemous crime: buying a round and being unable to pay for it. Stabbing him in turn chills, just as it should, the law – the Law? – acting as it should, in a world without God, let alone humanity.

Yet it is not, of course, without God, as the hurricane may or may not have warned us. He may have been watching all along—though the inhabitants have not been watching Him. The children of Mahagonny, lost in the wilderness, have – in striking parallel with Moses und Aron – fashioned their own idols, a fattened calf included, only to dismember it for pleasure, in anticipating of what they will do to Jimmy. In a moment that is somehow both touching and not, Jenny declines to participate, paving the way for God to deliver His judgement. An ape in a machine, a Cabaret-racialised alienation of the traditional deus ex machina, wheels itself around pathetically onstage, in contrast not only with the loudspeaker but also with the groups of ‘character’ and ‘city’ voices, now heard surrounding us in a spatialised Passion. Ours is a world, nowhere more so than in Berlin, fashioned and even staged by National Socialism and the Holocaust. God, morality, or socialism might be right, but is not might right really? So maybe there was no God after all. Jimmy thought it was Nature, after all, and perhaps it was—though that vision might ultimately be worse vision (this side of socialism, anyway). What if Mahagonny does exist, is not a made-up word, and cannot but endure? What if, to quote from a high priestess of neoliberalism, ‘there is no alternative’?

So far, so (mostly) Brecht, but what of Weill—and indeed Brecht-Weill? Kosky’s direction certainly assisted the creation of the latter, attentive musically and in turn granting the impression that ‘musical’ and ‘dramatic’ worlds helped construct one another, even – particularly? – when they might come into conflict. As an opera, Mahagonny presents its own opportunities and difficulties; one cannot simply perform it as if it were The Threepenny Opera or even the Mahagonny Songspiel, even if one wished to, though the kinship remains clear at every turn and can hardly be ignored. Alexander Joel and the Komische Oper orchestra brought a strong sense of that ‘Twenties’ sound to us: hard-edged, band-like, yet also more clearly than ever founded a good deal of the time in the world of Weill’s teacher, Busoni. Some tempi surprised, but not in a bad way: they had one relisten and appreciate why they were as they were. The sense of a monument on which musical as well as other history might be inscribed came through, not despite but through the immediacy of the songs. That went for the excellent chorus too: a mass of individuals when called for, yet equally an implacable single mass as required—dramatically and musically. 

There would be no more point in trying to imitate Lotte Lenya than there would be Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeburg (conductor on the celebrated first recording) or indeed Alexander Zemlinsky (who conducted both Leipzig and Berlin premieres). Nadja Mchantaf, an extraordinarily versatile artists whom I have seen here in roles ranging from Fiordiligi to Rusalka, brought her own, vividly lifelike Jenny to the stage: beautifully sung and very much her own woman. There was some, yet not too much, ‘genuine’ feeling between her and Gerard Schneider’s Jimmy—with whom, likewise, one sympathised enough at times, without the work lapsing into something else. Indeed, our Jim-in-Gethsemane paved the way skilfully and properly for both the judgement of the final scene and its disregard. As ever with the Komische Oper, there was a strong sense of a company performance, many of the roles being drawn from its own principals—as, of course, one might expect at Brecht’s own theatre. Ultimately, message and ‘experience’ were starkly more than the sum of their parts—as they must be in a world such as this.

Image: my own ( Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof)

Stemme/Svensson - Wagner, Liszt, Koch, Mahler, and Weill, 2 March 2023

Wigmore Hall

Wagner: Wesendonck-Lieder
Wagner-Liszt: Am stillen Herd aus Richard Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’, S 448
Sigurd von Koch: Die geheimnisvolle Flöte
Mahler: Kindertotenlieder
Weill: Happy End: ‘Surabaya Johnny’; Nannas Lied; Youkali

Nina Stemme (soprano)

Magnus Svensson (piano)

What it is to hear a great voice such as Nina Stemme’s at close quarters. Doubtless there will be some – there always are – for whom this was not, according to their own arbitrary definition, ‘true Lieder singing’. (They probably said the same about Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, though would deny it now.) Such silly, anti-operatic snobbery aside, though, anyone actually listening to Stemme’s way with words, here at the Wigmore Hall just as on the stage at Covent Garden or Bayreuth, will have heard that it was precisely that, furthered by a voice that never needed to strain, yet which never sounded too big, and which sounded as if it could have gone on all night. 

The Wesendonck-Lieder are perhaps not the easiest place to begin, cold, but here was the hochdramatisch thing from the start. The size of Stemme’s voice was apparent, of course, but so too were seemingly endless reserves of breath. Hardly surprisingly, echoes – presentiments, really – of Tristan und Isolde were heard. And the leisure of the close to the opening ‘Stehe still!’ was indicative of an approach that could and did take its time, seeing no reason to rush, without even the slightest hint of dragging. Magnus Svensson proved a supportive pianist, but this was really Stemme’s show, ‘Der Engel’ beginning with relative intimacy, blooming at her behest, the piano in tandem. There was a little of Isolde on stage too, Stemme gazing into the distance in the piano introductions to ‘Im Treibhaus’ and ‘Träume’: not stagey, but rather poised. The former’s tessitura permitted a taste of what her Brangäne might have been like too. Ringing top notes in ‘Schmerzen’ and ‘Träume’ alike, the former leading to a truly exultant climax, the latter’s detailed colouring, each reiteration of the word ‘Träume’ subtly different, a joy in itself. If Svensson’s solo rendition of Liszt’s Meistersinger paraphrase proved a little stiff, freer the more it became Liszt proper, then it was a welcome opportunity to hear a true rarity. 

Another rarity was Sigurd von Koch’s 1916 song-cycle, Die geheimnisvolle Flöte, in a well-judged performance that might have been prepared for a repertoire work. Setting poems from Hans Bethge’s collection Die chinesische Flöte, known to many musicians from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Koch offers well-crafted responses, firmly rooted in German song tradition, yet with occasional hints of something more Debussyan (in harmony, rather than word-setting). Stemme and Svensson treated each of the five songs individually, with their own moods, yet also as part of a greater whole. The sadness of ‘Traurig Frühlingsnacht’ and the dark defiance of the closing ‘Herbstgefühl’ – no gentle autumnal – were especially captivating, the latter quite something in performance. 

Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder is, of course, absolutely central to the repertoire, more often heard in orchestral guise, yet with such clarity and spareness heard here perhaps sounding both more starkly modernist and closer to Bach. Stemme offered great clarity too, both of line and of purpose, though she was certainly not deaf to Mahler’s irony, a nice link to the Weill songs to come. If it were difficult not to think of this performance in some sense as ‘operatic’, it was certainly not so in a negative way. As in the Wesendonck-Lieder, Stemme was not afraid to colour with tuning, a sign of well-placed confidence as well as artistic judgement. She, as well as Svensson, used harmony – for instance on the words ‘O Augen’ in the second song – to evoke Wagnerian mystery. The intensity of ‘Wenn dein Mütterlein’ gave way to still greater sadness, again not without irony or indeed straightforward delusion, in ‘Oft denk’ ich sie sind nur augegangen’. True Mahlerian horror was unleashed in the closing ‘In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus’, the hallucinatory final stanza a proper heir to Winterreise. (Now there is an intriguing prospect.) 

Stemme’s use of words was crucial in Weill – with and without Brecht – in which three songs she continued to hold the audience in the palm of her hand. Svensson’s pianism seemed just the thing here too, idiomatic throughout. So vividly communicative was Nannas Lied that surely a listener without texts and without a word of German would have had a strong idea of the ‘Liebesmarkt’ and the challenges of moving beyond ‘siebzehn’. The tango rhythms of Youkali offered still more alluring cabaret, also – perhaps oddly – making me think we need to hear Stemme in Schoenberg, from the cabaret of the Brettl-Lieder to full-throated Erwartung. As an encore we heard the Broadway Weill: ‘My Ship’ from Lady in the Dark, despatched indeed with sails made of silk, Stemme’s English as perfect as her German. Wonderful!

For Berlin

March, this year

October, this year. A Schöneberg café

Storm Large/Hudson Shad/BBC SO/Gaffigan - Korngold, Weill, et al., 23 November 2016

Barbican Hall


Korngold – Symphony in F-sharp
Walter Jurmann – Veronika, der Lenz ist da
Dimitri Tiomkin – High Noon: ‘Do not forsake me, O my darlin’’
Weill – A Touch of Venus: ‘Speak Low’
Weill – Klopslied
Jurmann/Bronisław Kaper – A Day at the Races: ‘All God’s Children Got Rhythm’
Weill – The Seven Deadly Sins

Storm Large (singer)

Hudson Shad

BBC Symphony Orchestra

James Gaffigan (conductor)

In the world’s present parlous state, Brecht (Weill too, perhaps) speaks to us more clearly, more sharply than most. Donald Trump could pretty much have sprung from the pages of Mahagonny, or indeed The Seven Deadly Sins. The fine performance of that masterly ballet chanté which was the necessary performance in this BBC Symphony Orchestra performance. The rest I could pretty much take or leave, although there were clearly admirers in the audience.

 

When first hearing Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp (in the BBC Philharmonic recording with Edward Downes), I rather liked it. It must have been years since I had last heard the piece; I cannot say that I had missed it greatly, and indeed found it something of a bore on this occasion. It was a well-enough upholstered bore, yet I did not find the material justified the length. In the first movement, it took a while for the orchestra to achieve a good balance, although the Barbican acoustic should probably take some blame for that. (Thanks to the Government, by the way, for scuppering the plan for a decent concert hall in London!) James Gaffigan went to considerable extremes of tempo, but held the movement together pretty well. A certain cinematic quality to its progress was not inappropriate, nor was a certain sonic similarity to the ‘heroic’ Prokofiev of the Fifth Symphony. Transitions were well handled in the scherzo, though ensemble was not always so precise as it might have been. I liked the languorous quality to its trio; Gaffigan’s tempo, however, sometimes brought the music to near-standstill. A Brucknerian quality was apparent in the slow movement, which received a warmly neo-Romantic reading, not lacking in necessary malice. The finale proved colourful, but a well-paced performance could not disguise its excess of repetitions.

 

The second half opened with a number of close-harmony pieces from the American group, Hudson Shad. I am not convinced that concert-hall listening is really quite right for such music: perhaps they would be better off in a bar, with drinks and chatter. (But then, I was never able to understand Cambridge choirs’ enthusiasm for them; I longed to hear more Byrd instead…) My patience for Kurt Jurmann’s hit Veronika, der Lenz its da was limited indeed, but others seemed to enjoy its ever-so-mild camp. Likewise the other Jurmann song, and the two contributions from Dimitri Tiomkin. ‘Speak Low’ from A Touch of Venus served to reinforce my prejudice that Weill’s music lost almost all interest upon emigration across the Atlantic. The short Klopslied, however, was recognisably the work of Busoni’s pupil, albeit with a healthy dose of surrealism thrown in. The gentlemen did not overplay it, thereby letting its anarchic wit speak for itself. It was a real find (for me, that is).

 

For The Seven Deadly Sins, Gaffigan and the orchestra returned, joined by Storm Large, a singer with real presence, indeed real star quality. For a performance in English (the translation by Auden and Kallman), one is better putting out of one’s mind the world of Lotte Lenya. That was surprisingly easy, for Large, ably accompanied, made the work very much her own, in a subtle, sharply observed, finely enunciated performance. She could act, but did not need to draw attention to the fact, just as she could sing and dance, again without any need for underlining. The shedding of her overcoat spoke volumes; so did the chill of those spoken Anna II statements: ‘Right, Anna’. With a wind-heavy band that sounded just right, with Gaffigan unfailingly adopting tempi that sounded equally right, and with just the proper sense, from time to time, of a little rhythmic drag, Weill permitted Brecht to speak. Dance rhythms pointed to Weill as ironic heir to Mahler. Much orchestral material reminded us that this was the composer of that magnificent Second Symphony. (What a pity we had not heard that in the first half instead! Or indeed the Violin Concerto.) Hudson Shad were on excellent form too, their ‘Family’ often sounding very much of a Neue Sachlichkeit world, the bite of Brecht’s text – ‘Shameless hoarders earn themselves a bad name’ – drawing blood. The exploration of sins had a properly cumulative effect as far as ‘Envy’, after which the Epilogue proved a further study in alienation. They were going home to Louisana, to that little home beside the Mississippi. ‘Right, Anna!’