Kurt Weill - The Seven Deadly Sins (Simon Rattle)

Information

Composer: Kurt Weill

• The Seven Deadly Sins
• Death in the Forest, Op. 23
• Street Scene, Act I: Lonely House
• Four Walt Whitman Songs: Nos. 1 & 4
• Little Threepenny Music

Magdalena Kožená

Andrew Staples

Florian Boesch

Ross Ramgobin

Alessandro Fisher

London Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle, conductor

Date: 2025

Label: LSO Live

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Released in collaboration with the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York and coinciding with celebrations of Sir Simon Rattle's 70th birthday in January 2025, the London Symphony Orchestra's signature label will release a new recording of Weill's stinging critique of capitalist society, 'The Seven Deadly Sins'.

Featuring soloists such as Magdalena Kožená, Andrew Staples and Florian Boesch, this adds to Rattle's acclaimed series of opera recordings on LSO Live.

Kurt Weill began his career in the early 1920s, after a musical childhood in Dessau and several years of study in Berlin. By the time his first opera, The Protagonist (libretto by Georg Kaiser), was performed in April 1926, he was an established young German composer. He had already decided to devote himself to the musical theatre, and his works with Bertolt Brecht soon made him famous all over Europe.

He fled the new Nazi regime in March 1933 and continued his indefatigable efforts, first in Paris (1933-35), then in the US until his death. Certain common threads tie together his career: a concern for social justice, an aggressive pursuit of highly regarded playwrights and lyricists as collaborators, and the ability to address audience tastes no matter where he found himself. His most important works are the Violin Concerto (1925), The Threepenny Opera (Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, 1928), Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Brecht and Hauptmann, 1930), The Pledge (Caspar Neher, 1932), Der Silbersee (Georg Kaiser, 1933), The Seven Deadly Sins (Brecht, 1933), Lady in the Dark (Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin, 1941), Street scene (Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes, 1947), and Lost in the Stars (Maxwell Anderson, 1949). He died of heart failure in 1950, shortly after beginning work on a musical adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, leaving behind a large catalogue of works and a reputation that continues to grow.

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