Beethove: Aus Goethes Faust Op 75 No 3 Loewe: Edward Op 1 No 1 / Die wandelnde Glocke Op 20 No 3 Schubert: Erlkönig D328 Schumann: Die Löwenbraut Op 31 No 1 / Der Schatzgräber Op 45 No 1 Brahms: Es war ein Markgraf überm Rhein WoO33 No 29 Wolf: Der Feuerreiter No 44 of Gedichte von Eduard Mörike Mahler: Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen Stanford: La belle dame sans merci Scott: Lord Randall Sullivan: The Lost Chord Emanuel: The Desert Porter: The Tale of the Oyster
Wholenote Discoveries - July/August 2011
Singers crave novel material for their recordings: obscure works, cherished favourites… whatever it takes to create tempting new song packages. Baritone Gerald Finley’s recent release samples the Ballad repertoire and offers a wonderfully chosen program ranging from dark gothic musings of 19th century German and English composers to the devilishly clever writing of Cole Porter. Finley lives up to his reputation for consistent and solid performance meeting the need of each ballad’s text with an impressive dramatic acuity that elevates the finest singers above the rest of their colleagues. Most notable is his amazing portrayal of the demon in Schubert’s Erlkönig where he assumes a strangely nasal vocal character and deliberately sings the Erlkönig’s extended passages just slightly flat to drive home the evil in the text. I’ve never heard this done before and it’s stunningly effective. Similarly, Hugo Wolf’s Der Feuerreiter also offers some character vocal moments that most singers simply never attempt. Perhaps the biggest surprise is Finley’s multiple impersonations of narrator, mollusc and socialite in Cole Porter’s The Tale of The Oyster. Eating at a seafood restaurant will never be the same. Long-time accompanist and artistic partner Julius Drake does so much more than just play the notes to back-up the voice. In Mahler’s Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen he crafts a remarkable orchestral colour palette from the keyboard. Drake knows how to be pianistically comedic as well as dramatic, romantic as well as impish. His artistic contribution is a significant reason for this disc’s success. Alex Baran
Record Of The Month This latest release from the multi-award-winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake features a literary and musical form which inspired the greatest voices of German Romanticism. The foremost poets and composers of the age saw the ballad as a direct link to the folk-minstrels of the past. Frequently ghoulish and sensational in character, ballads satisfied the popular taste for the Gothic. This disc contains some of the greatest examples of the form, including Schubert's Erlkönig, as well as some fascinating and lesser-known works. The disc also includes selections from the ever-popular English ballad tradition. Gerald Finley's unrivalled gift for characterization and story-telling, honed both on the stages of opera houses around the world and through his extraordinary Lieder recordings, makes him the ideal performer of these works. This is a genuinely entertaining and original disc.
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Price: $22.98