Our November Recording of the Month is the Deutsche Grammophon debut of Joana Mallwitz, Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin and the first woman to take charge of an orchestra in the German capital. The Kurt Weill Album presents the composer’s two contrasting symphonies alongside a visceral account of The Seven Deadly Sins, Brecht and Weill’s still-relevant exposé of sexual exploitation (DG 4865670).

The single-movement First Symphony or Berliner Symphonie, written when Weill was just 20, is a whirlwind of ideas, interrogated here by Mallwitz as if it were an opera without words. The Second Symphony, also known as the Fantaisie symphonique and completed in Paris where Weill had fled to escape the Nazis, is more classically proportioned. Like all good storytellers, Mallwitz knows how to lift this music off the page.

For The Seven Deadly Sins she has a trump card in Katharine Mehrling, a true singing actor who senses when to speak, when to whisper and occasionally when to howl. So powerfully do they deliver the narrative, you barely need a word of German to understand the predicament of...