Words and music
DAVID WILKINS listens to Urszula Kryger singing Chopin
Readers of this site might want to send
me correcting e-mails with the exceptions (and I'd be glad to receive
them) but, for my money, all serious composers want to engage themselves
with texts at some stage. Perhaps it's all about the age-old debate between
words and music - the one that Richard Strauss slightly (but rightly) fudged
in his last opera - Capriccio. Abstract music may have the ability
to communicate all generalised emotions but the temptation of the specific
as presented in a poem is a tantalising challenge even for those, like Chopin,
who succeeded in writing the most exquisite 'songs without words' in instrumental
form.
Chopin never really intended his songs for the vagaries of posterity
and public criticism. Or so we are told! Nevertheless, they contain a heavy
weight of his personal feelings - about love and human relations and, as
importantly, about his nationalistic sympathies for Poland's folklore and
historically vulnerable but essentially indomitable spirit.
Before receiving this excellent disc for review, I knew only a few
of Chopin's songs as performed by Robert Tear as coupled to his Rachmaninoff
recital on Belart (461 6262). They are extremely well performed by that
doyen of English tenors - 'though he does make you think of Tchaikovsky's
Onegin with every sigh-ridden phrase. On this superbly recorded Hyperion
disc, however, they make the kind of authentic impact that reminds me of
the scene in Visconti's film of 'Death in Venice' where the very spirit
of Tadzio's Polishness is adumbrated by an unaccompanied vocal lament. The
unfamiliar language weaves its own magic. The voice is richly communicative
and the sense of accustomed melancholy (either accepted or temporarily spurned),
quite overwhelming.
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Copyright © 14 May 2000 David Wilkins,
Eastbourne, East Sussex, UK
PURCHASE THIS DISC FROM AMAZON
PURCHASE FROM CROTCHET
CD INFORMATION - HYPERION CDA 67125
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