 Idée irrésistible, du moins sur le papier. Dagmar Peckova, connue pour sa fantaisie et son aplomb, enregistre tout un disque du répertoire Weill chéri par Lotte Lenya. Hélas le modèle est vite embarassant, il ne faut mieux pas confronter leurs Moritat von Mackie Messer ou leur Alabama Song. Là où Lenya fuse et mord, Peckova peine avec sa voix lourde, son vibrato envahissant, même si elle comprend l’esprit de cette musique elle n’en a simplement plus les moyens, s’illusionnant sur le fait que Lenya elle-même chantât son Weill jusqu’au bout, mais même dans une voix usée à la trame, toujours claire et sonore. Peckova ne peut pas faire claquer les mots comme elle, son allemand n’est pas assez berlinois, son anglais trop gras, son français (méconnaissable Je ne t’aime pas) trop incertain. Reste que pourtant l’album s’écoute même en enrageant, car les arrangements et la direction de Jan Kucera sont d’une intelligence rare, les interventions de Jiri Hajek assez géniales, la couleur d’ensemble est elle très Berlin même pour « I’m a stranger here myself », ce qui est au fond assez bien vu. Si vous êtes un inconditionnel de Peckova, vous voudrez l’album, mais moi, je retourne à Lotte Lenya et à Ute Lemper (Discophilia - Artalinna.com). (Jean-Charles Hoffelé) “We cannot approach opera from the position of snobbish dismissal. We cannot write operas while at the same time lamenting the deficiencies of the genre. We must fulfil our own ideal by making use of that which the stage has to offer,” so wrote Kurt Weill in 1926. At the time, he had just begun seeking a new musical genre, one that would supersede the conventional opera. The resounding success of Die Greigroschenoper proved that the path he had taken was the right one; the new genre emerged at an appropriate time, and it seemed that the audience had been waiting for opera’s resurgence too. The adventurous journey Weill pursued for half a century, led from Germany to Paris and finally to New York City. The result of his efforts were considerable simplification of the musical idiom, inspiration by pop and jazz, and the assignment of the vocal parts to actors without traditional professional voice training. It was a true revolution. And that represented a challenge for the mezzo-soprano Dagmar Pecková, who throughout her illustrious career has appeared on the world’s most prominent stages as an artist acclaimed as a refined performer of music by Mozart, Mahler, Bizet ... An artist who, however, never contents herself with academism and empty form. One of her dreams, to make an album of Kurt Weill’s songs, has now come true, 25 years after she portrayed at the Stuttgart Opera the lead female role in the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. The singular poetics of Weill’s songs, a fabulous orchestra and splendid arrangements blending classical music and jazz – and, of course, Dagmar Pecková, who has never been “just” a diva, but a singer who makes her dreams come true and does everything with great enthusiasm.
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