A tribute not only to the composer Kurt Weill but also to Bertolt Brecht, his book-and-lyric-writing collaborator on the international smash The Threepenny Opera. The partnership was far from a happy one yet yielded, while it lasted, several swell results. The project at La Scala originated during the pandemic as a diptych coupling the self-standing ballet The Seven Deadly Sins (dynamite!) with the Mahagonny Songspiel, a dramatic sketch that was to burgeon into the full-fledged opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Now add to these two panels a third consisting of a suite of songs from the American-style musical Happy End (based partly on Shaw’s Major Barbara, partly on a story by Damon Runyon that would later feed into Guys and Dolls). La Scala’s music director Riccardo Chailly conducts. The director is Irina Brook, daughter of Peter (The Empty Space) Brook, one of the 20th century’s most influential theatrical thinkers. We’re told that Irina “reread Brecht’s caustic social commentary from an environmental angle, inventing a minimalistic scenography with discarded materials and a sea of plastic bottles.” Okay, though for us, the playlist of great songs justifies itself without an overarching political agenda. —Matthew Gurewitsch