Kate Lindsey / Baptiste Trotignon THOUSANDS OF MILES

 

THOUSANDS OF MILES

 

Daniel Hope HOPE@HOME

HOPE@HOME

Olivia Vermeulen / Jan Philip Schulze DIRTY MINDS

DIRTY MINDS

Claudio Constantini / Louiza Hamadi 20TH CENTURY TANGO

20TH CENTURY TANGO

Ian Bostridge / Antonio Pappano REQUIEM - THE PITY OF WAR

Marking the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano have assembled Requiem, a programme of songs offering historical and poetic perspectives on this momentous event. Composed over a period of some 50 years, the songs were written by Gustav Mahler, Kurt Weill and two creative musicians of promise and achievement whose lives were cut short by the Great War, the Englishman George Butterworth (1885-1916) and the German Rudi Stephan (1887-1915). 

"The three Wunderhorn songs are the highlight of the album for me, though I suspect that they’re also the tracks which will really polarise listeners: this is where Bostridge pushes the voice to its absolute limits, flattening the tone and leaving high notes exposed and raw as Mahler’s terrified little drummer-boy and mortally wounded soldier live out their final, agonising moments...Like the album as a whole, it’s by no means an easy listen - but nor should it be." (Katherine Cooper)

This most anguished of British tenors sings as if piercing each note with a bleeding arrow in a selection that doesn’t just make you feel deeply, but also makes you think...a most thoughtfully planned, wide-ranging recital, splendidly serviced by Pappano’s nimble piano. (The Times) 

Marion Rampal / Quatuor Manfred / Raphaël Imbert BYE-BYE BERLIN

Bye bye… or Berlin for ever? Throughout the 1920s all eyes were turned towards Berlin. Driven by a collective energy, artists of all persuasions (writers, painters, architects, filmmakers and composers) there established the principles of ‘New Objectivity’, which saw the city become the very epitome of modernity, at the same time as following in the footsteps of other great cities worldwide, not least New York, the birthplace of jazz. Life in Berlin was not the stuff of romance however: strikes, poverty, repression, the rise of Nazism… The post-war social context contributed to the craze that swept the capital for cabaret, a kind of safety valve that allowed for a moral and social release. 

It is this ephemeral, underground world of ‘Great Berlin’ as depicted in ‘The Blue Angel’ that Marion Rampal and the Quatuor Manfred invite us to rediscover here, in collaboration with saxophonist Raphaël Imbert: a liberal burst of freedom and humanity delivered with passion.

Kate Lindsey / Baptiste Trotignon THOUSANDS OF MILES

Closing the distance between classical music and Broadway, between the old and new worlds, between opera and jazz... Thousands of Miles is born out of an encounter between two extraordinary performers: opera star Kate Lindsey and jazz pianist Baptiste Trotignon.

For their debut joint album, Kate Lindsey and Baptiste Trotignon have produced a rich and varied programme around the songs of Kurt Weill, from Nanna’s Lied and Trouble Man, to classics from The Threepenny Opera and Lost in the Stars. The journey through three European languages brings the listener to the very beginnings of jazz, and features new arrangements and deft improvisations by the award-winning Trotignon. They also pay homage to three composers who, like Weill, were forced to leave their homelands in Germany and Austria, emigrating to the ‘new world’ of the United States of America and taking their stories and styles with them: Alma Mahler, Zemlinsky and Korngold. The disparate group are united by a shared narrative, their songs all speaking of intense longing and homesickness. Several songs have rarely been recorded before.

London-based, American mezzo soprano Kate Lindsey has thrilled audiences around the globe with her performances of Mozart and Purcell, but grew up steeped in the music of Broadway, from Gershwin to Cole Porter. She comments “the works on Thousands of Miles all share a deep, complex search for a sense of belonging, for a collective spirit, for a physical and emotional home. In exploring this idea, Baptiste and I brought together our two very different musical worlds. It was a journey where we both had to open ourselves up and make ourselves vulnerable, myself as a classically-trained singer, and Baptiste, who has rhythm in his DNA. Together, I hope we developed a deep mutual understanding of each other's musical language and used it to enrich our own.”

Daniel Hope FOR SEASONS

Twenty years ago I came up with a concept that I called “For Seasons”. Since then it has evolved. Mankind has been fascinated by the seasons for an eternity. Hippocrates advised, “Look to the seasons when choosing your cures”; Albert Camus reflected: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

The quarterly divisions of the year are characterized by weather, the hours of daylight, the changes in nature and the cumulative effect of these on mankind, flora and fauna. This album takes Viv-aldi’s masterpiece one step further – by placing it in the context of a 21st-century climatic response: the 12 months are each represented by a specific piece of music. And in turn, 12 visual artists respond to the music and to the seasons.
Let us hope we may all live in a world in which seasons not only exist, but in which their beauty is globally protected. And that they continue to enchant and inspire us. (Daniel Hope)

Anna Prohaska / Eric Schneider BEHIND THE LINES

Judging from the photos used to publicise Anna Prohaska’s new album – one of them is dancing merrily above this review – this gorgeously gifted soprano should have been singing this spin-off recital wearing an army great coat. She compromised with a severe black tunic and trousers with military references and a slight science-fiction cut: she could almost have been a futuristic soldier from the old Korda film Things to Come. In her case the things that came were the complete tracks of her Deutsche Grammophon CD Behind the Lines: songs from around Europe and America about war and the pity of war; songs of drummer boys, valiant grenadiers, mothers, ghosts. Joan of Arc made an appearance too, via Liszt’s dramatic scena Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher. As she launched her programme’s European tour I wondered if Prohaska’s voice – bright, lightweight and magically lyrical – would actually suit a repertoire marked with male bravado, bitter ironies and intense cries of pain. I need not have been bothered. Supported by Eric Schneider’s always conscientious piano accompaniment, she was magnificent, and very penetrating in her top register. When she sang Liszt’s repeated line about saving France I’m sure France heard her. Lower down, if the notes sped by fast, the sunshine of her voice did, it’s true, get a bit clouded over. Hugo Wolf’s Eichendorff setting "Der Soldat" certainly needed clearer projection for the words to carry their full zing. But, whatever the register traversed, Prohaska’s emotional identification and acting skills always helped fill out the song’s picture. No characterisation was better than the child thrilled with her mother going off to war in Eisler’s typically trenchant "Kriegslied eines Kindes". The grisly abandon of the child’s drum imitations; the relish when Kaiser Wilhelm’s name was intoned; the white calm that descended when the child visualised the mother wounded in hospital: every line of this wonderful song delivered a sharp sardonic kick. What joy, too, to find two artists creating a concept album and recital that actually makes musical and intellectual sense. The 25 songs about the dreams and realities of soldiering often involved big jumps in style: another of Eisler’s firecracker songs, from the Hollywood Liederbook, exploded right after one an exquisite meringue by Roger Quilter, "Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun". But in this year marking the anniversary of the First World War, every juxtaposition, sometimes bridged by songs sharing the same key, made the audience think and feel. Prohaska and Schneider’s most stunning coup was to follow the high romance of Schubert’s "Ellens Gesang", to flowery words by Sir Walter Scott, with the Expressionist screams of a poem by Georg Trakl, belligerently set by a young Wolfgang Rihm. I needed the interval to recover. Along the way, Prohaska suggested that she was impressively fluent in every language, not perhaps surprising given her own mixed family background (Austrian, English, Irish, Czech). In Rachmaninov I felt the Russian earth move. French vowels fluted impeccably in Poulenc’s "Le retour du sergent" and the peaceable encore from Fauré. American English bobbed up too in a button-holing trio of Charles Ives, including the marvellous "In Flanders Field", and the concluding duo, less musically satisfying, from Weill’s settings of Walt Whitman. But German remained her chief meat and drink, with the emotional peak probably reached in Mahler’s Wunderhorn song about the girl visited by her soldier sweetheart’s ghost: a song indeed heard many times before, but rarely with Prohaska’s degree of lyrical tenderness, or so much of the art that conceals art. Even if she’d sung this recital wearing bright pink, we’d still have been left heartbroken, lying at her feet. (Geoff Brown)