Mother Courage & Her Children/Huckleberry Finn/The Silent World of Hector Mann

A three-CD set from Duke Special that makes brothers of Brecht, Weill, Twain and Auster: Peter Wilson’s suffered a massive art attack for our benefit. Mother Courage is the soundtrack to Brecht’s classic, staged at the National Theatre in London last winter and starring Fiona Shaw, who requested the Duke’s musical participation. Brecht fits him like a second-hand suit bequeathed by some German doppleganger: big band oompah gut punches (‘Mother Courage’, ‘Eilif’, ‘Soldier’s Song’) and banjo-plucking, cigar-puffing ballads (‘Yvette’, ‘Song of the Hours’, ‘Farmhouse Song’). If the material is beyond reproach, best then to praise Wilson’s plaintive and pleasing Norn tenor set against intricately-stitched arrangements.
As for Huckleberry Finn, Kurt Weill had intended a musical based on Twain’s yarn, but died before he and lyricist Maxwell Anderson could complete their work. What remains are five songs: a lovely swaying hymn to the Mississippi entitled ‘River Chanty’; a gorgeously Gershwin-ish ‘Come In, Mornin’’; a rollicking Garden of Eden allegory ‘Apple Jack’; a swoonsome MGM-standard ‘This Time Next Year’; and the old-timey ‘Catfish Song’, which sounds a bit like The Band goofing off in a Bavarian bier keller. Lovely stuff.
The Silent World of Hector Mann uses as its thematic spine the twelve obscure silent films made by the protagonist of Paul Auster’s 2002 novel The Book Of Illusions. The Duke farmed out songwriting duties to mates like Neil Hannon, Ed Harcourt and Thomas Truax, as well as penning a tune himself, and the whole shebang was recorded with great sensitivity by Steve Albini in Chicago. Constraints of time and space prohibit exhaustive analysis, but suffice it to say that the collection runs the gamut from minstrelsy, ragtime and old school C&W (Ronnie Minor’s ‘Hearth and Home’; Phil Wilkinson’s ‘Double Or Nothing’; Réa Curran’s ‘Old Folks and Cow Pokes’), to supper club Beckett (the Duke’s own ‘Mr Nobody’) and Weimar whimsy (Ben Castle’s ‘Tango Tangle’).
Next stop Carnegie Hall.
Peter Murphy
Key tracks: ‘Soldier’s Song’; ‘This Time Next Year’; ‘Mr Nobody’.