CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Hanns Eisler is the great exception to the rule that there is really no such thing as an unjustly neglected composer, so it was reassuring to find at least a few of his pieces providing the framework to Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's evening of cabaret songs, which was conceived and conducted by Dominic Muldowney.
Each half of the programme was introduced by one of the brittle, acerbic instrumental suites that Eisler assembled from the theatre music he composed in Berlin in the early 1930s. Three of his greatest lyrics, all settings of Brecht, were scattered through the sequence of old and new songs that Mary Carewe and Richard Morris sang in a nicely understated theatrical setting devised by Di Trevis.
Eilser's contemporaries were also included ? there were two songs by Mischa Spoliansky, better known for the film scores he composed after he emigrated to Britain in 1933, and one by Stefan Wolpe, who went to develop his own brand of serialism after he left Germany, but whose music of the late 1920s is very close to Eisler's in style. Carewe and Morris sang them all with perfectly judged sardonic humour.
Muldowney's own Six Cabaret Songs, in new arrangements for ensemble specially commissioned by BCMG, were also threaded through the evening. Four of them are settings of Auden, couched in a style that perfectly fitted into this context, without ever sounding like pastiche or parody.
Colin Matthews rearranged Blue Peacock, his stranger-than-fiction slice of cold-war history for the occasion, while another new arrangement, John Woolrich's Four Flowers, based on a episode from the Serbian conflict, was all the more chilling for its restraint.
Monica Keena Anne Marie Kortright Paige Butcher Amanda Peet Xenia Seeberg
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