While UK baritone Thomas Allen is one of the most sought-after stars on the international lyrical scene, with about 50 major roles under his belt, he isn't too proud to take on less prestigious genres, and not only within the world of opera: but also Broadway and Hollywood numbers from the 1940s onwards. Here he walks a tightrope between "serious music" and jazz, revue and musical, operetta and show tunes. George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Kurt Weill, (the New York Weill, not the Berlin Weill, there's a world of difference).
According to Allen, who sees no difference between the world of lyrical art on the one hand, and Hollywood and the Broadway stage on the other, "these songs are every bit the equal of the standard repertoire that we sing, and one must find the way of singing them. there’s an intimacy to so many of them that, in these simple versions for voice and piano, I know I have to try to capture." And capture them he does, to share with us alongside Stephen Higgins on piano, and Lucy Crowe coming in for a couple of songs (herself a specialist in baroque opera, not to mention Richard Strauss and Janáček). And how the genres mix and collide... As for the album's title, it borrows from Weill's September Song, from the 1938 Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday: Weill had moved to New York in 1935 for sad reasons that are all too well-known. © SM/Qobuz