Katie Bray praised for nuanced album of Kurt Weill songs

Katie Bray’s In Search of Youkali: Songs of Kurt Weill is a programme that maps a voyage through the exiled, itinerant composer’s chameleonic songwriting, undertaken with pianist William Vann, accordionist Murray Grainger and double bassist Marianne Schofield.

The 1935 song Youkali, a lilting tango that embodied Weill’s image of a promised but unattainable land of desires, serves as the lodestar: the album opens with a haunting unaccompanied musing on the Youkali melody, returns to it throughout, and reaches the song in full at the end. The sequence takes in numbers in German, French and English, including a couple written for the Huckleberry Finn musical Weill was working on at the time of his death. (The artwork for In Search of Youkali is credited to Chandos.)

Bray and Vann have been developing the programme together for years, and that fluency shows; the accordion and double bass are used tellingly, “painting in subtle rather than primary colours.” Bray is described as outstanding: from the “deliciously acerbic” Barbarasong to the “bleakly controlled emotion” of Je ne t’aime pas, her trained voice is said to sound communicative and natural in this repertoire.

Key Topics

Culture, Katie Bray, Kurt Weill, William Vann, Murray Grainger, Youkali