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Published on Taipei Times http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2003/02/28/196290 CD Reviews By Bradley WintertonCONTRIBUTING REPORTER Friday, Feb 28, 2003, Page 19
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.
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.
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.
BEETHOVEN:
DVORAK:
MOZART: All of these recordings, dating from 1957 to 1977, have been issued before, in some cases several times. Why, then, is Sony going to such lengths to promote them? The only polite answer can be that they believe there is an innocent audience out there who will be attracted to them by their (relatively) low prices. That said, there is some fine playing here. The Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell was in the 1960s one of the very finest of all American orchestras, as was the Philadelphia under Eugene Ormandy. As for the soloists, pianist Rudolf Serkin and violinist Isaac Stern remain legendary names. You can't go wrong with performances like these, even though the sound is full rather than sharp and precise in the modern way.
CHARLOTTE CHURCH: PRELUDE
MARIO FRANGOULIS: SOMETIMES Mario Frangoulis' offering is even worse. The title track features Puccini's tenor aria Nessun Dorma. This contains the following words (in English translation): "You too, O princess, in your chaste room, are watching the stars which tremble with hope and love." This, together with memories of another Puccini aria, has led lyricist Steve Wood to come up with the following: "And the stars were shining ... and the earth smelled sweet ... the garden gate creaked ... her footsteps barely touched the path ... . She came in, so fragrant, and fell into my arms." This is accompanied by bongo-style drumming on heavy-duty, industrial-strength drums, and the result physically hurts your ears.
Why do Sony expect the Taipei Times to review this sympathetically in a classical music column? It's vulgar in a way that makes the vulgarity of past ages seem like heavenly choirs. In addition, every effort is made in the accompanying illustrations of Frangoulis to market this CD through his physical allure. This is a tactic common enough with popular music, less common with classical. That Sony are applying this treatment to Frangoulis demonstrates that they are not seriously in the business of attracting classical music-lovers to this CD.
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