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Weill: Die Dreigroschenoper—The Threepenny Opera (Lotte Lenya, with supporting cast and orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Bruckner-Ruggeberg; Colum—bia, 2 LPs). Composer Weill's widow Lotte Lenya (TIME, Aug. n) went to Berlin last winter to handpick and train singers, direct a 30th anniversary recording of the complete score (including some lusty, gutsy sections never before performed) for the first time in Bertolt Brecht's inimitable original German. The result is by far the best recorded recreation of Kurt Weill's jazzy, bitterly ironic score, with Singer Lenya herself heading a first-rate cast. Every sardonic, vulgar accent is in place, and despite the music's familiarity, it sounds as fresh and sharp in this version as if Mack had a Drand new knife.
Shostakovich: From Jewish Folk Poetry, Opus 79 (Nina Dorlyak, Zara Do-ukhanova, Alexei Maslenikov; composer at the piano; Monitor). Shostakovich's :acit reproach to Stalinist antiSemitism, this lyrical, introspective music for three voices and piano offers a rewarding _limpse—far more intimate than his recent bombastic orchestral works—into the spirit of the talented, troubled man who s today's top Soviet composer.