Here’s something rather special and just a little bit different. In Kurt Weill’s Youkali, a haunting French setting with words by Roger Fernay, the protagonist imagines a land of heart’s desire that somehow is always out of reach: “It is happiness, it is pleasure, but it is a dream, a folly. There is no Youkali!”

It’s the starting point for Katie Bray’s seductive and enthralling odyssey, a journey through Weill’s life and music, drawing parallels between the exiled German composer’s chameleon-like reinventions in Paris and the United States and the search for a socialist utopia he could never attain. 

A debate has been raging seemingly forever about what kind of voice should sing Weill, ramping up after the death of Lotte Lenya when the estate decreed that the composer had wanted operatic voices in works that had previously been commanded by Lenya’s increasingly gravelly mezzo. Even Ute Lemper fell foul. Those who find the classical voice too prim and proper for this music should take a listen to Bray. The British mezzo-soprano never betrays her operatic roots yet somehow sounds perfectly suited to...