Sometimes it seems that the major CD companies in Taipei aren't really interested in classical music at all. You call them up and ask what they've got new that would be suitable for review, and what they send you are cross-over recordings that are actually painful to listen to, or re-issues.
Classical music apparently accounts for around 7 percent of CD sales, so the big companies, at least in Taiwan, would seem to be promoting either watered-down items they think they can sell in large numbers, or re-issues of old material they hold the copyright to that cost them next to nothing to produce.
Classical music lovers may be a minority, but what they want is something very different -- new versions of established classics, or new music. This has therefore often fallen to small, independent labels to come up with.
This month's selection illustrates this exactly, old material that has been re-cycled time and time again, plus mindless cross-over garbage, and something really fine material from a small outfit in Wales, UK.
SCHUBERT: DIE WINTERREISE
Robert Lloyd & Julius Drake
Seren, Poetry Wales Press
2 Wyndham Street, Bridgend, CF31 1EF, UK
Telephone: 44-1656-767834
e-mail: mickfelton@seren.force9.co.uk
Schubert's song-cycle Die Winterreise (The winter journey) doesn't make for easy listening, but it's an unassailable classic for all that. The 24 songs were originally written for a tenor voice but are nowadays almost invariably sung in a version for baritone. They tell of a sad trip through a winter landscape away from a broken love-affair. All the features of a northern winter -- snow, ice, bare trees, crows looking for food, the demented traveler's dream of warm sunlight -- are used as metaphors for the pains of lost love. Schubert's friends were aghast when he first played the songs to them -- they'd never heard anything so depressing. Indeed Robert Lloyd in a program note here says he thinks the work is "a musical representation of depression." Even so, it becomes hauntingly memorable after a few hearings.
Lloyd is one of Britain's top baritone singers. He recently said goodbye to the world of international opera, but added "I am not saying farewell to singing. Far from it. I cannot imagine life without singing. I hope to continue with other forms of singing and all related activities for as long as I have my health." (Opera magazine, London, March 2003).
He is certainly in magnificent voice here, and his dark tones are especially suited to Schubert's much-recorded masterpiece. He is accompanied quite brilliantly by pianist Julius Drake. The piano accompaniments are anyway in themselves perpetually engaging, and listening to the piano provides the best way to approach the feeling of these initially sometimes unwelcoming songs. The recording is exceptionally vivid, indeed of demonstration quality.
But there's more to this issue than the CD. It comes encased in a book which contains an English translation of the words, a facsimile of Robert Lloyd's score (complete with his scribbled notes to himself about interpretation), and 23 abstract color designs to accompany all but one of the songs by the artist Pip Woolf. These are executed on local Welsh slate, in fact former roofing slates with the two holes drilled to hold the slate in place still visible. Woolf must have picked them up from a builder in the Welsh hills known as the Brecon Beacons where she lives. The whole package is elegantly designed by Gil Chambers.
RSS