SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

An Evening of Kurt Weill - Stephanie Darkins and Friends: Birmingham Conservatoire Recital Hall, 9.2 2010 (GR)


I always look forward to the quarterly Concert Diary of events at Birmingham’s Conservatoire. It contains details of regular composer and performer platforms, instrumental and vocal competitions, and festivals covering the whole music range from classical to jazz. The 2010 January-March programme includes such highlights as the Chamber Music Fest 2010, the World Premiere of Scoring a Century by David Blake and Frontiers Plus their contemporary promotion, this year featuring Louis Andriessen. With performances from both students and professionals on offer, standards vary but disappointments are rare. The entertainment factor was certainly in evidence at An Evening of Kurt Weill. What an excellent subject Weill must have been for Stephanie Darkins’ final year project. Excerpts from both his opera collaborations with Bertolt Brecht and his Broadway musicals featured in Darkins’ well thought out and presented programme. The relaxed cabaret style setting of tables and chairs in the Conservatoire’s Recital Hall added to the informality and success of the evening.

Narrators Kay Standen and Rosie Secker gave brief details of the background behind the two excerpts from Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, before Darkins’ first solo contribution – ‘Surabaya Johnny’ from Happy End. In this moving song, she showed she had a big heart, even if her subject showed none. Another song Je ne t’aime pas followed; Lucie Louvrier captured the French cabaret tradition and got the repeated message of Maurice Magre’s title lyrics across with a clever variation in emphasis and tone. Not for nothing is this post-graduate student playing the female lead in the forthcoming Scoring a Century. Val Whitlock gave her second contribution of the evening to close the first act – a foot-tapping number from Lady in the Dark, playing up to the men in the front row with the words of Ira Gershwin’s ‘One Life to Live’.

Wolf whistles and other appropriate noises from supporting students greeted Stephanie Darkins as she opened Act 2 with ‘Saga of Jenny’ another number from Lady in the Dark; but there was nothing ‘poor’ about this lady who was ‘making the most of it’, perfectly in tune with Sara Wilander her accompanist, on duty for the whole of the evening. Another young woman who ‘seems to have made up her mind’ to embark upon a singing career is Helena Raeburn. No stranger to Conservatoire productions, she sang the Ogden Nash lyrics ‘I’m a stranger here myself’ from another of Weill’s Broadway hits , One Touch of Venus. Good luck to her. Phillippa Cairns kept the fun coming, socking the words of Alan Jay Lerner with a snap, crackle and pop as ‘Mr Right’ from Love Life. Matthew Stone joined Stephanie Darkins to wind up the evening with Weill’s best known single ‘Mack the Knife’ from The Threepenny Opera. In her introduction to the programme our hostess hoped she might send the audience home humming one of Weill’s unforgettable tunes. She succeeded. In my case it was her ‘Jenny’.

Geoff Read