An European In Broadway – Irene Rinaldi

An outsider par excellence in twentieth-century music, Kurt Weill represents a unique case of a composer who is appreciated both by those in the field of “cultivated” music and by those in the mainstream repertoire. He was able to create a style of his own, which can be recognized after just a few bars; his music became the soundtrack of an entire epoch, and his songs inspired entire generations of composers who came after him and who wrote both for the concert hall and for the musical and cinema. Irene Rinaldi, accompanied here by Michelangelo Carbonara, paints an efficacious portrait of both the German and the American periods of the composer, choosing works from the dramatic repertoire as well as self-standing Lieder. The album is completed by a rarely performed suite by Philippe Jarnach, who had been Kurt Weill’s teacher in Germany, and whose works are juxtaposed, for the first time, to those by his most famous pupil, showing the aspects of continuity among them and thus indicating a new way for studying this composer’s music.