Life more than a cabaret for Weill
L’orchestre d’hommes-orchestres honours composer’s versatility
Don’t expect reproductions of Kurt Weill’s most well-known works and songs — The Threepenny Opera, Mack the Knife, September Song — when L’orchestre d’hommes-orchestres performs its multidisciplinary Cabaret Brise-Jour (Shattered Cabaret) for five nights, starting Friday, at the Montreal International Jazz Festival.
The ensemble’s eight members prefer to “put ourselves in danger,” says ringleader Bruno Bouchard, by presenting “hints and clues” rather than faithful renderings of Weill’s scores — which is precisely in the spirit of the great German-American composer.
“The one thing that brings us to someone’s work is an instinctive love for that work,” says Bouchard, “so a lot of it isn’t explainable. Weill had a wide array of musical influences. In fact, he was criticized for being so polyvalent, and that’s probably what interested us in the first place, and we try to take the same approach. It’s something we really enjoy going into.
“We use the material of the composer as a playground. We take his material and use it to play the game he was playing. You will find references from Weill’s various periods of life — ‘this makes me think of such and such’ — but nothing we want to strictly reproduce. It’s a fresco of pieces of history all put together, and the only thing we’re really stating on stage is our own life over an hour and a half.”
Weill’s wide scope, from chamber music and symphonies to cabaret music and Broadway, was grounded in the belief that his music should be enjoyed by the general public as well as the musical elite. Early on, this son of a cantor in Dessau, 70 miles from Berlin, augmented his composition studies with the great classical iconoclast Ferruccio Busoni by playing piano in a tavern. (Busoni advised him: “Do not be afraid of banality.”)
It would be a pallid under- statement to say Weill merged European and American forms; in time, he was recognized as his own genre. His most popular examples of “art for the people” are The Threepenny Opera (and its jaunty murder song Mack the Knife, with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht) and Mahagonny (whose Alabama Song has been recorded by the Doors, David Bowie and Ute Lemper, among others).
“Sometimes there are weird harmonies or a very intellectual way of singing, then the very easy songs to remember,” says Bouchard. “For us, it’s all part of the research that leads us to play a music we’ve never imagined before. We try to revisit Weill our own way, being close to popular culture as well as contemporary musique actuelle and art. That’s probably something we share with him.”
This “ambiguity,” as Alex Ross terms it in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, set Weill apart. “Threepenny sits on the border between classical and popular genres, combining ‘hit’ numbers with modernistic textures and socially critical themes. Weill’s most ingenious move was to score his breakthrough theatre piece not for a symphony orchestra, but for a sleek, mutable band of seven musicians, who were asked to play no fewer than 28 different instruments … And by asking his performers to take on so many roles, Weill guarantees that the playing will have, in place of soulless professional expertise, a scrappy, seat-ofthe-pants energy.”
Bouchard says L’orchestre d’hommes-orchestres typically works for years on a project so the audience can see as well as hear the music. Its previous success was an imaginative rendering of the world of Tom Waits.
“We work on the music first, the textures we want to create, then on which objects and tricks go in which song. We go back and forth and we learn way too many songs and then cut because some visual aspects aren’t strong enough. We aim for a balance between what you see and what you hear.”
Weill leaned left politically, but not so far as Brecht. “I cannot set the Communist manifesto to music,” Weill said dryly. Nonetheless, his works of the early 1930s infuriated the Nazis.
His relationship with singer, actress and dancer Lotte Lenya was fruitful. “She can’t read music, but when she sings, people listen as if it were Caruso,” he wrote in 1929. Lenya single-handedly revived Weill’s music after his death. Their collected letters, Speak Low (When You Speak Love), is a page-turner, fascinating for insights into art, love, disagreements and creation.
Upon his death in 1950, a month after his 50th birthday, the writer of September Song, Pirate Jenny, Speak Low and Lost in the Stars was described by composer and critic Virgil Thomson as “the most original single workman in the whole musical theatre, internationally considered, during the last quarter century. … Every work was a new model, a new shape, a new solution to dramatic problems.”
Bouchard adds: “Shattered Cabaret is a show for all types of people, all ages and backgrounds. We sing in three languages, which are as important as the music and images. We work on languages that are really open and have not one fixed meaning, but many meanings.”
L’orchestre d’hommes-orchestres performs Cabaret Brise-Jour Friday through Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Musée d’art contemporain, 185 Ste-Catherine St. W. Tickets cost $34.50 via montrealjazzfest.com.