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Deutsche Grammophon Releases All-Weill Recording: Joana Mallwitz Conducts Weill

Sep. 26, 2024

Joana Mallwitz’s acclaimed inaugural season as Music Director of the Berlin Konzerthausorchester began with a fine performance of Kurt Weill’s first symphony, Symphonie in einem Satz. Now her tenure as a Deutsche Grammophon recording artist begins with an all-Weill release that brings together both of Weill’s symphonies with the always popular sung ballet Die sieben Todsünden, with Katharine Mehrling in the lead role.


Excerpt of Joana Mallwitz conducting Weill's Symphony No. 1 "Berliner Sinfonie"

The release has occasioned a flurry of coverage built around conversations with Mallwitz, which prove her so eloquent on the subject of Weill and his music that there’s little need to do more than quote her. Here is an assemblage from interviews published by Gramophone magazine and bachtrack.com: 

“I believe, in his first symphony, Weill was interested in this pure idea of humanity, of a people finding peace. It has a very immediate direction into the heart of the listener. And listening to it you can feel that it’s so honest. It’s so raw. There's no showiness in it. He really cared about this message, and this makes it incredibly strong.” 

“It’s funny: people don’t know what they’re missing if they’ve not heard Weill’s symphonies. I always used to make a joke about Weill’s Second Symphony: Everyone loves it. Audiences love it. Orchestras love to play it – but nobody knows it! Bruno Walter, who premiered the second symphony, fell in love with it. He really believed in it. He took it everywhere. He premiered it in Amsterdam with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. He took it to New York, to the New York Philharmonic, and later he took it to Vienna. Weill really had a fighter in this famous conductor.” 

“The most important thing, I think, to Weill was to write music for people, to bring music to people. It was the message of the music to tell people something, to make people care about it–maybe that’s why later in life he wrote more and more works for stage and for more popular genres, without losing the depth and complexity of absolute symphonic music. His later Broadway works sound like an extract of his early symphonies.”


Joana Mallwitz talks about conducting Weill

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