FROM AROUND THE WORLD: HAMBURG.(Review)

Is Kurt Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny the twentieth century's answer to Gotterdammerung? That was the question posed by the Hamburg Staatsoper's new production (Nov. 12). Not by coincidence, for Mahagonny was produced by Peter Konwitschny, the director of Stuttgart's recent, glorious Gotterdammerung; Stuttgart's Siegfried, Albert Bonnema, here played Weill's protagonist, Paul Ackermann (usually called Jimmy Mahoney). And, just as the Stuttgart production shed all operatic conventions, presenting the finale in concert form, so the Hamburg Mahagonny ultimately was transformed into an oratorio. During Act II, the orchestra played, big-band fashion, on a multi-tiered platform upstage, but for the finale they were rolled downstage, while choristers crowded on carrying placards; their contradictory slogans were less anti-capitalist than pro-pleasure. Money may still make the world go `round, but this millennial Mahagonny seemed more interested in having fun.

Throughout the evening, music reigned supreme. Librettist Bertolt Brecht might have hated the production, but Weill would have loved it. Since attending the 1956 recording sessions of Mahagonny by Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya, I've seen dozens of productions of this work, but I don't remember a single performance that so fully met its official classification as "an opera in three acts." For the first time, I discovered the truly poetic dimension of Weill's score.

Ingo Metzmacher, leading members of the Hamburg Philharmonic, didn't slight the bright pungency that drives so much of the music. In Mahagonny's jazzy moments, the whole auditorium seemed to soar; in the finale, the orchestra dove headlong into the tremendous momentum of the funeral march. In the hurricane sequence, staged by Konwitschny with alarming intensity, Metzmacher gave a model interpretation of the score's contrapuntal texture, reflecting ...