Kurt Weill - Georg Kaiser - Der Silbersee -.wmv 

bellissima opera! grande Kurt Weill

I saw a marvelous production of this masterpiece at the New York City Opera, with Joel Grey, many years ago and this fine recording brings back that great experience

Weill and Latham-König at their best!

What a Wonderful Work! and Performance!

Forget the words.Listen to them and listen to the music.This is why this is my song.I love but one song - it becomes a different colour inside my head.It isn't to do with money.I become a human travelling into leaves and in-and-around trees the way a breeze would;the way a breeze does.I am no longer physical;I have achieved freedom from me as well as the world as well as thinking.While I flow I am separate from this world.This is what awaits me everytime I listen to this.and I mean EVERYTIME.It has been so for 22 years.(With a few pills) I will escape me wheelchair;and all the while this song will fly and soar within me.

The melodrama part beginning around 25:30 is breathtakingly moving. Olim! Tut es dir leid? including the Lottery Agent song at 33:00, as beautiful as it is frightening. The finale at 1:34:00. Der See fror zu! Weill's choral arrangements were peerless.

great opera!

BTW, if you can"t stand the full extent of the horror of 20s Germany and want to get to the (imagined by Weill and Kaiser) happy bit, - "um uns zu locken?"- when the sun comes out, it starts at 1:41. Gets me every time... "Alles was ist, ist Beginnen und verliert sich hinter der Zeit..."

I wish I knew German so that I could understand this. Still, the music is beautiful.

Wow. Weill's last word to Germany. So well done: I especially like Olim's voice, and Frau von Luber is wonderfully evil and oleaginous. It's a very difficult score, and this performance doesn't always nail it. But I don't know of a better performance, except for Ute Lemper's flawless studio recordings of three numbers: the Lottery-Agent song, Fennimore's "arme Verwandte" song and her Caesar song. I think Ute Lemper, in these 3-minute excerpts, puts in more of the anger and venom that this play seems to need. I would love a whole performance to maintain that level of intensity: the way Weill wrote the score clearly indicates a desire to punch you in the face and disturb you. However, Ute Lemper's performances start and finish with one song. They're great, but they're concert performances. The speakers/singers in this performance are wonderful in the context of the whole Singspiel: embedded in its darkness, rather than wryly commenting on it. Though that makes me wonder whether a combination of great voice actors and singers, combined with someone with a less operatic voice like Lemper to take on the extraordinary interventions (Lottery Agent, Fennimore including her "Wer weiter muss, den trägt der Silbersee" final lines), along with a well-rested, paid and rehearsed orchestra to bring out more of the violence of Weill's music, wouldn't make the ideal Silbersee. Such an unjustly neglected piece of music. I can't find the libretto (freely) anywhere, and my partial German can't keep up with Kaiser's words, so I always think I'm missing something. So after loving this piece for so long I'll go and BUY it. (Heard something about an English translation for a festival in Cork, by - weirdly - Rory Bremner: but I can't find any details about that either).

3:18, 8:17, 12:57

...vergiss es -ca. 20 mal werbung---- geldgeier... so toll ists dann doch nicht