By Tim Smith [Baltimore Sun, 10 November 2009]

A Kurt Weill song can’t be mistaken for anything else. There’s something tense in the warmest of his melodic lines, something pointed in the simplest of his harmonies. And that’s even before you consider the words. Weill was inspired by some remarkable lyricists — Bertolt Brecht, Ira Gershwin, Walter Mehring, Roger Fernay, Maurice Magre, Maxwell Anderson — who found fresh ways of addressing the old issues of love and loss.