The Kurt Weill Album review – an impressively intense debut for Joana Mallwitz

Last year Joana Mallwitz took over the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra, the first woman to be chief conductor of a Berlin orchestra. Even in a city with no shortage of outstanding bands, the Konzerthaus has a fine pedigree; founded in East Berlin in 1952 as the Berlin Symphony and threatened with closure after reunification, it’s had a distinguished series of chief conductors, most notably the great Kurt Sanderling, who was in charge of the orchestra for 17 years.
On the evidence of their first recording with Mallwitz for Deutsche Grammophon, in music by a composer with impeccable Berlin connections, there’s already a good rapport between the conductor and her players. Kurt Weill’s rarely heard pair of symphonies – the Hindemith-like First composed in Berlin in 1921, when Weill was studying with Busoni, the more strictly neoclassical Second completed in Paris in 1934 – frame his 1933 ballet chanté, Die Sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins), with the singer-actor Katharine Mehrling as Anna. The symphonies are muscular and intense, the theatre piece pungent and sardonic; it’s an impressive debut disc.
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