Word: lenya
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...child," as Observer Margot Asquith described her, was Singer Lotte Lenya. The song was by her husband, Composer Kurt Weill, who celebrated the mood of his German generation in such gorgeously tawdry musical plays as The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny. Last week, in Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium, Singer Lenya, fiftyish, stepped before a microphone again and rekindled the feeling of those darkly cynical days. The concert was a tribute both to Composer Weill's remarkable durability and to Lotte Lenya's own great gifts as a singing actress...
...Columbia LP, Lotte Lenya sings Berlin Theatre Songs by Kurt Weill; the composer's widow does Mack the Knife and other Threepenny ditties as they should be done. Fiftyish, and after two years of starring in a successful New York revival of the work, Lotte Lenya still sings with a smoky, strangely appealing quality that always suggests the waif beneath the cynic...
...echoes of Threepenny Opera tunes. Composer Weill (who died in the U.S. in 1950) grew lyrical, sentimental and popular in such musicals as Lady in the Dark and Lost in the Stars. But in this album he is still the unreconstructed composer of gutter nihilisms. In one ditty. Singer Lenya is a bitter, jilted girl who snarls at her indifferent lover: "Take that pipe out of your kisser, you dog!" In the chilling Berlin Requiem she sings the horrifying vision of a drowned girl whose body is decomposing, limb by limb, as "God gradually forgot her, first her face, then...
...rigorous demands of Weill's music. Her cruelty and cynicism give added dimension to numbers like "The Ballad of Survival" and "The Ballad of Dependency." Bronia Sielewicz, as the prostitute Jenny, will make even the most sentimental viewer forgive her for replacing the familiar German accent of Lotte Lenya. "The Pirate Jenny" and "The Solomon Song" are two of the best examples of Weill and Brecht's art and Miss Sielewicz gives them at least their due. Sara-Jane Smith plays Polly Peachum with a fine veneer of innocence and propriety barely covering Polly's lusty nature. Miss Smith, with...
...musical numbers recall German café music of the hungry '20s. The artfully threadbare orchestration gives them a kind of tawdry elegance, as of faded Viennese waltzes with indecisive endings. Among the best: Pirate Jenny, appealingly rasped by Composer Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya,* dreaming of an escape from drudgery by joining a pirate crew; the Ballad of Dependency, in which Comedienne Charlotte Rae derides Macheath's virility...