Weill's is one of those names which comes up a lot, but he and his art have always seemed sort of just off in the horizon, rather than being on the verge of graspability. I suppose that I'd been put off by my hazy sense that he was a kind of High Art - maybe Modernist, maybe postmodernist (but in either case, Difficult) - type, which is all very well in some fields, but not so much when the starting point is 'classical' music (given my own background, I mean).
A little while back, though, I was haunting the local library looking for something new and noticed a recording of his stuff; thought I'd give it a go, and it turns out to be very listenable indeed. The key thing here, I think, is that the pieces gathered here - his 'ballet chanté' "Die sieben Todsünden" and various other songs - really are songs in the natural sense, voice-focused and with melody lines almost always carried forward by a single instrument when the voice is absent. As a result, I can enjoy the tunes and the drama and the sense of humour, and get a handle on the genre-crossing that's going on, and realise that it's neat-o.
