Search - Creighton Thompson, David Evan Thomas, David Thomas :: Weill:Street Scene

Kurt Weill harbored ambitions to compose the great American opera in the public, populist forum of Broadway, much as Gershwin did with Porgy and Bess. He did so in the 1947 Street Scene, which is a three-hour panorama of working-class American life revolving around a woman in an abusive marriage who is murdered for seeking comfort elsewhere. Weill never demonstrated a more remarkable fluency in a range of popular music style, but the piece's somewhat dated (and deliberate) sense of dramaturgy is apparent in this single disc of excerpts, performed in the comparatively reserved Broadway style of the 1940s. Though Langston Hughes's lyrics capture the Edward Hopperesque loneliness of those times, they can also be cloyingly bald. Weill's combination of pop-music manner and Puccinian operatic grandeur has since been more cohesively negotiated. However, excerpts this extensive would have been possible only in the dawn of the LP era, with cast members Anne Jeffreys, Polyna Stoska, and Brian Sullivan showing how this piece's journey started. --David Patrick Stearns