With her new Kurt Weill recording out today, mezzo-soprano Katie Bray shares what draws her to his music—and remembers soaring above the stage in a daring aerial production
Kurt Weill’s exquisite song, Youkali, the centerpiece of my album, has provided me with inspiration for many projects since I first heard it as a teenager. In recent years, I have wanted to explore Youkali’s particular theme of searching for a beautiful, fantasy land where everyone is accepting, kind, loving. The song reaches for a place outside of our world experience. It expresses a desire to take our feet off the ground and to be transported. Aerial performance, and flying, Peter-Pan-like, through the space, seemed too perfect an avenue to leave unexplored when considering how to stage a show based around Youkali, so I was thrilled when given the opportunity to develop this idea at the Centre de création in France, directed by Tim Claydon, ex-aerialist and opera director.
Add into the mix that Weill was a German Jew, living through the 1920s and 1930s, and forced into exile in Paris, and you’ve got the opportunity not just to tell the story of this song, but of Weill’s life, and his search for meaning and freedom. Weill often wrote about a desire to escape and to discover, or rediscover, kindness, love, a sense of belonging. Think of Nanna’s Lied (1939) and the final lines:
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Where are the tears of yesterday evening?
Where is the snow of last year?
And also of J’attends un navire (1934), where a woman waits for the ship that will carry her away from her miserable life as a prostitute. Fleeing unhappy situations, or yearning for another life away from the one we know, is a common theme in Weill’s songs, and the reason I chose to name the album In Search of Youkali.
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I’ve always been interested in physical performance as a singer – dance, circus, aerial, anything that connects us to our bodies and uses them to tell the stories, rather than relying solely on the voice to do that. The idea of an opera singer as a performer who stands still and makes big noises has certainly never appealed to me, or to my particular way of performing. I want to fuse different ways of performing, collaborate with artists who have ways of telling stories without their voices, and also see how much it is possible to do physically, whilst still being able to sing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have discovered that it is possible to do so much more than we think, and the voice can even be gloriously freed when combined with fluid physical movement, being suspended, lifted, even upside down. I must mention here the thrilling summer I spent at Vache Baroque in Buckinghamshire, fusing opera and circus, challenging ourselves, experimenting, climbing, falling, laughing, and connecting with the music and the people, and we all discovered we could push ourselves so much further than we anticipated.
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This leads me onto the wider topic of singing and the body. Thankfully, the days of park and bark are behind us, and there is most certainly a very welcome movement towards freeing up our bodies, strengthening our bodies, gaining flexibility and confidence in our bodies, all of which help us sing and perform much more successfully. We can harness the power beneath us, from the deep core of the earth, and use it to ignite us. There is so much energy to be taken from the earth if only we connect to it, and think of our power as singers as being much lower down than just in the larynx. I’ve always been moved by Edith Piaf’s performances, so profoundly connected to the earth and harnessing the immense power of it. And the best physical performers, and now I’m thinking of the extraordinary Martha Graham, showed us that the primal connection between our bodies and the earth is the most powerful thing of all.
Katie Bray will launch her debut solo album – In Search of Youkali: Songs of Kurt Weill – at Fidelio Café on Friday 9 January 2026
The album’s first single ‘Youkali’ is released on 28 November. The full album is released on Chandos on 9 January.