Youkali, for Kurt Weill, was the land of desires, promised but never to be attained – a strong image for an exiled and itinerant composer. The 1935 song in which he captured the idea, a lilting tango, forms the lodestar of Katie Bray’s voyage through Weill’s chameleonic songwriting career, undertaken alongside the pianist William Vann, accordionist Murray Grainger and double bassist Marianne Schofield, the latter moonlighting from the Hermes Experiment.
First, we hear a haunting, unaccompanied musing on the Youkali melody, then more of these punctuate the programme until we reach the song in full at the end. The journey takes in numbers in German, French and English – some familiar, some not – including a couple of songs written for the Huckleberry Finn musical Weill was working on at the time of his death.
Bray and Vann have been developing this programme together for years, and it shows in their easy fluency; the other two instruments are used tellingly, painting in subtle rather than primary colours. As for Bray, she is outstanding. From the deliciously acerbic Barbarasong to the bleakly controlled emotion in Je ne t’aime pas, her singing is a demonstration of how an elevated, “trained” voice can sound wonderfully communicative and natural in this music.
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