Vasks & Weill: Violin Concertos - Anthony Marwood, Academy of St Martin in the Fields

  Kurt Weill (1900–1950) began his career in the early 1920s after a musical childhood and several years of study in Berlin with the composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni. By 1926 he was an established young German-Jewish composer but he had already decided to devote himself to the musical theatre (he married the actress Lotte Lenya in 1926) and his works with Bertolt Brecht soon made him famous all over Europe. He fled the new Nazi leadership in March 1933 and lived in America for his remaining years. Weill composed his violin concerto in 1924; its orchestration and harmonies suggest the Second Viennese School and sit somewhere between Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Weill injects humorous and morose themes often mixing the two together as if they were indistinguishable. He uses the soloist-versus-orchestra format, the violin often competing against angular rhythms in the orchestra with an agitated lyrical line; there is also noticable jazz influence. The violin concerto by Latvian-born Pete