Lost in the Stars | Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill / Levine, Lenya, Armstrong, Gilford, et al

One of the essentials. | Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill / Levine, Lenya, Armstrong, Gilford, et al | Kurt Weill, Maurice Levine, ...

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	• Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill / Levine, Lenya, Armstrong, Gilford, et al Kurt Weill, Maurice Levine, ... Sony, 1999 average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Singers don't sound like this anymore

There is a popular myth that wives who sing their husbands' songs are their best interpreters (not so with Cher) and there is some truth in that. Edvard Grieg's wife Nina has a unique voice that created its own genre but the insight she imbues in Grieg's music using poets' lyrics are beyond reproach. Lenya being the wife of Weill belongs to that hallowed group. The album has some added tracks to commemorate Weill's centennial (2000). Lenya's original versions of "My Foolish Heart" and "The Saga of Jenny" are idiomatically beautiful. The year in which she sang them (1957) found her in a quavery soprano that is not bel canto or formally trained. She has this -- pardon the oxymoron-- ugly lovely voice that is engaging. And that quaver is attractive to listen to. The additional tracks found her singing songs in "Cabaret" and other songs where her late husband was associated. The year she sang them was 1962 and the vocal difference between 1957 and 1962 are interesting. Where a fluttery voice marked the 1957 recordings, the 1962 voice is an octave lower than laryngitis. But my oh my, can she sing those songs like "So What" and "Married". If advancing age is supposed to make a singer grow more instrospective then Lenya was it. The other tracks has her singing "Mack the Knife" in German and doing the same song with Louis Armstrong in English. The rehearsal take of that song is quite informative. Lenya, obviously not a jazz singer, has problems with the rhythm, but Satchmo, ever the Ambassador guides her and the result is short of magical. Get this album and play when you're in a contemplative and a bit aggressively articulate mood.

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Lost in the Stars

Lenya--like Callas--was more than a singer. She became the characters, and poured her life of pain and joy into every note. Lenya could not have sung as she did, had she not lived in the dark 1920's Berlin.

Hearing her for the first time can be startling: coarse, cigarette-stained. Bleak, heartless. Or painfully vulnerable. The bitter-sweet "It Never Was You" is true love. Practically screaming in "Trouble Man." Rollicking in "So What!"

And as others have mentioned, toward the end hearing Louis Armstrong COACHING Lenya on "Mack the Knife," which she and Weill created--and Lenya taking laughing graciously along.

The is required listening, just as "Seven Deadly Sins and Berlin Theatre Songs." I envy the person who meets Lenya the first time. Unique. Phenomenal. Incomparable.

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One of the essentials.

Lotte Lenya was an authentic legend of the musical theatre. Her performances in "The Threepenny Opera" and "Cabaret" are considered by those who saw them to be among the finest ever given anywhere. This CD includes her treasured numbers from both of those landmark shows - but wait, there's more. Lenya also sings most of her husband Kurt Weill's best known American theatre songs like "September Song," "Lost in the Stars," "Speak Low" and "The Saga of Jenny." Anyone who has ever heard Lenya sing knows that she has a unique voice - not pretty or always in perfect pitch. It doesn't matter. She's got "it," and that's all that matters. These recordings ring true to character. My two favorites on this CD are "Foolish Heart" and "It Never Was You." Both nearly forgotten gems. All musical theatre fans should own this CD - it's trul essential.

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Remember Lotte Lenya from James Bond!!!

Yes she was the evil comrad in From Russia with Love, the best James Bond movie. It's so funny when she hits of the pretty bond girl, even before Bond himself can! Yes Lotte sings here, and yes this is the same Lotte Lenya, Bobby Daris is referring to in his song Mack The Knife(Miss Lotte Lenya... and ol' Lucy Brown.. oh the line forms on the right baby... now that Macky's back in town". OK this cd is campy and kittchy but that's it's main appaela, Lotte is sort of like a whacke dout Marlene Deitrich, GREAT!!!

Weill and Lenya and Armstrong, oh my! Buy It!!

`Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill' is a CD of an older vinyl release on which Lenya, Weill's wife for about 20 years, up until his death in 1950, sings several songs from American musicals for which Weill wrote the music with various collaborators doing the lyrics. There are also a few songs from American musical plays by other German composers, Paul Dessau, Hanns Eisler, and John Kander.

Lenya is the quintessential Weill interpreter, as she was a performer on the Berlin stage in the late 1920s and many of Weill's German songs were specifically written to be performed by Lenya. (Ironically, Lotte Lenya is best known today as the actress playing Rosa Klebb in the second James Bond film, `From Russia With Love'. I guess she needed some cigarette money.) So, even though these English songs may not have been written with Lenya in mind, Ms. Lenya should know better than anyone else the kind of interpretation Weill expected from his music.

It is facinating to compare Lenya's singing these songs with that of other major Weill interpreters, especially our best contemporary Weill specialist, Ute Lemper. While Lemper gives us powerful readings, Lenya seems to have an inside track on some of the more gentle sentiments such as those we hear in `September Song', `Speak Low', `Lost in the Stars', and `Sing Me Not a Ballad'.

If nothing else about this album gets you excited, then wait for the finale, which is a duet on Weill's most famous song, `Mack the Knife', sung in English in a duet with Lenya and Louie Armstrong, backed by Armstrong's All-Stars and his own trumpet performance. The great irony of this encounter is on the very last track, where Armstrong is giving advice to Lenya on how to perform her husband's song which she has probably been singing for 30 years.

If you like Kurt Weill's songs or you simply like a wide variety of female vocalists, then this album is for you.

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The voice of Lotte Lenya--filled with a bittersweet tone, slight imperfections, and that unmistakable accent--is something you either love or hate. But decades later, the former wife of Kurt Weill still has a voice we can't forget. Simply put, nothing compares to Lenya. This reissue gathers her English-language September Song and Other American Theater Songs album from 1958 (for the first time here, heard in its stereo version) as well as her tunes from 1957's Cabaret; "Song of a German Mother" from the Broadway show Brecht on Brecht; and even a collaboration with Louis Armstrong on "Mack the Knife." These recordings were the cornerstone of Lenya's American career, and even with pop orchestration--"Saga of Jenny," "Green Up Time," "Speak Low"--these are infectious numbers. Like the previously released Sony Masterworks reissue of Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins, this is simply a great package. The sound quality is excellent and the eight-minute-long session outtake from "Mack the Knife" with Armstrong is truly fascinating. --Jason Verlinde

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