Once rarities on disc, Kurt Weill’s two symphonies seem to be receiving their due these days. This latest recording, however, is not just one of the most exciting – and convincing – accounts in the catalogue, it comes with a probing and acerbic account of The Seven Deadly Sins, the composers presciently relevant exposé of sexual exploitation. It’s the Deutsche Grammophon debut of the enthralling Joana Mallwitz, more of whom anon.

Weill’s single-movement First Symphony, written around the age of 20, takes its inspiration from a contemporary play entitled Workers, Peasants, Soldiers: A People’s Awakening to God (you can see where he was coming from). It’s a whirlwind of ideas – at times he seems to be trying to cram everything into it all at once. When he showed it the following year to his teacher Busoni, he was ticked off for being too much of a slave to Expressionism. Either way, it wasn’t performed until 1958, by which time Weill had been dead eight years.

The Second Symphony, completed in Paris in 1933 where Weill had gone to...