Berlin Theatre Songs.

As the world gears up for the centenary (in 2000) of Kurt Weill's birth, it seems remarkable that the works of this most haunting of 20th-century composers are still not completely represented on record. It amazes, also, to realize that although Weill, a refugee from the Third Reich, resettled in this country in 1935, it wasn't until two decades later that his music, despite the popularity of Bobby Darin's recording of "Mack the Knife," was accepted by the culturati.

First there was the 1952 adaptation by gay composer Marc Blitzstein of Weill's Weimar Republic masterpiece, The Threepenny Opera, a major hit when it opened off Broadway with the composer's widow, Lotte Lenya. Then in 1955 the visionaries at Columbia Records launched a series of LPs, all highlighting Lenya's incomparable gifts. Weill's astringent lyricism and corrosive ironies have been part of our musical consciousness ever since.

So Sony Classical's reissue of Berlin Theatre Songs, paired with the unusual opera-ballet, The Seven Deadly Sins (the composer's last collaboration with Bertolt Brecht), is welcome, especially because of its refurbished sound and bargain price (the omission of song texts, however, is disgraceful). Lenya, whose carrot-hued hair and crimson lips suggested a lost Gustav Klimt canvas, wins no points for vocal purity; she growls, she transposes, she comes perilously close to speech-song. But no other artist so completely penetrates to the marrow of this material; no other singer evokes the hedonism, the horror, and the heartbreak of a world on the brink of the apocalypse. And no other quite so exuberantly elevates sleaze to the level of high art.

Berlin Theatre Songs is a compendium of hits from The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Happy End, and Berlin Requiem Also, its excerpts from The Silverlake, A Winter's Tale should prove a delightful discovery.

So should Music for Johnny Johnson--the first complete recording of Weill's second Broadway project--featuring the Otare Pit Band under the direction of Joel Cohen. Paul Green's libretto traces the career of an all-American Everyman, unlucky both in war and love. Johnny Johnson ran only 68 performances in its premiere in 1936 and has been revived sporadically. But Weillaholics have always cherished the work for "Johnny's Song"--a mordant melody recalling the composer at his Berlin best--Captain Valentine's tango, and the nurse's tender "Mon Ami, My Friend." You'll leave the compact disc player whistling the tunes.