This is not a Barry Humphries cabaret. Of Dame Edna Everage or Sir Les Patterson there is no sign, and even in propria persona the Australian humorist restricts himself to the occasional wry anecdote amidst his introductions and explanations; he is billed in the (extraordinarily informative) programme as “Conférencier”, and after an opening reminiscence about an age of now-forgotten words and concepts such as “bookshop”, “manners” and “Gordon Brown” he gets down to the real business.

Just after World War Two, the teenage Humphries bought a collection of unfamiliar German sheet music in a second-hand store in Melbourne, and found a trove of little-known material from the Weimar cabaret era. For this brief run he has marshalled the Aurora Orchestra and chanteuse Meow Meow to perform a selection of largely forgotten work from the period: of the dozen composers represented, the only ones whose names I knew were Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Paul Hindemith, and the only actual material I recognised was a brace of Weill/Brecht numbers.

The 84-year-old Humphries may have been taking it easy at the preview I saw, but he showed an undisguised reliance on onstage autocue screens for his links; he and Meow Meow also made a joke out of what may have been necessity as she prompted him through a joint dance routine. For the most part, though, he sits at one side of the stage as the orchestra under skilled violinst and occasional vocalist Satu Vänskä play unknown music, including what is apparently only the third public outing for an extract from Max Brand’s opera Maschinist Hopkins and Meow Meow giving a spirited rendition of a scored vocal female orgasm by Erwin Schulhoff (eat your heart out, Donna Summer).

The music is often at once jazz and not. Like “Krautrock” in its own way decades later, one can hear a kind of musical conversation, with the composers here taking on board the idioms and inflexions of American music but determined that the actual utterances should nevertheless be distinctly European, even specifically German. Even a Weill tango sounds as if it hails not from Argentina but the lower reaches of the Danube. The music is fascinating, the information stimulating, the company excellent.

Written for the Financial Times.