Anne Sofie von Otter covers Speak Darkly, My Angel on new album, Sept. 2016

[johnfoyle]

http://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwclassic ... r-20160829

Brooklyn Rider, the game-changing string quartet hailed as "the future of chamber music" (Strings), releases a new album with Grammy Award-winning Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter on Naïve Classique on September 30.

The album juxtaposes the music of selected classical composers, who share what von Otter calls "anything from a toe to a whole foot in the world of popular music and jazz," with that of adventurous popular composers with a well-documented interest in classical music.

Included are works by Nico Muhly and Anders Hillborg; new compositions, specifically created for the project by Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw and Brooklyn Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen; and specially commissioned arrangements of pieces by John Adams, Elvis Costello, Rufus Wainwright, Sting, Björk, Kate Bush, and Brad Mehldau, who also collaborated with von Otter on her 2010 album, Love Songs.

ANNE SOFIE VON OTTER
BROOKLYN RIDER
So Many Things

Label: Naïve Classique
Release date: Friday, September 30

1. Pi (Kate Bush, arr. Kyle Sanna)
2. Am I in your light? (John Adams, arr. Evan Ziporyn)
3. Cant voi l'aube (Caroline Shaw)
4. For sixty cents (Colin Jacobsen)
5. Cover me (Björk, arr. Erik Arvinder)
6. So many things (Nico Muhly)
7. Kväll (A. Hillborg)
8. Hunter (Björk, arr. Vince Mendoza)
9. Love sublime (Brad Mehldau, arr. Patrick Zimmerli)
10. Speak darkly, my angel (Elvis Costello, arr. Rob Mathes)
11. Practical arrangement (Sting, arr. Rob Mathes)
12. Les feux d'artifice t'appellent (Rufus Wainwright, arr. Dana Lyn)
13. Bonus track: The birds will still be singing (Elvis Costello, arr. Rob Mathes)


Elvis released a version of the song on My Flame Burns Blue

http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/inde ... ,_My_Angel

http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/inde ... iner_notes

“Speak Darkly, My Angel”: One of a set of songs entitled Three Distracted Women, this number was first written for a concert tour by Anne Sofie von Otter and the Brodsky Quartet and performed by them in Paris, London, Madrid and Bologna.

The songs portray a trio of woman in contrasting predicaments. The first song is concerned with a vaudeville diva and her scheming understudy, and the last is about a woman living in the isolation of crumbling wealth that she compares to the life of a cosmonaut.

“Speak Darkly, My Angel” is the central black comic ballad that describes a wealthy divorcée who, after tiring of her younger lover at the end of the season, is considering pushing him out of the window.

[johnfoyle]

I just got a ticket for the UK show on Nov. 11th -

https://saffronhall.com/calendar/anne-s ... lyn-rider/

[sweetest punch]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertai ... story.html

Classical artists show that when it comes to new music, pop may be better

How do you get people to like contemporary music? As classical music presenters continue to ask themselves this question, they overlook one salient point: There’s a large body of music that does appeal, easily, to contemporary audiences. It’s called pop music. And as the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and the magnificent mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter showed Saturday night in a Washington Performing Arts concert at Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, it may even, sometimes, be better.

Von Otter and the quartet are on what amounts to an album tour for “So Many Things,” just released on Naive Records, which combines so-called new music — John Adams, Caroline Shaw and Nico Muhly, whose longish work gives the album its title — with so-called pop: Björk, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush. Unlike the recording, the concert divided the pop and classical pieces, with the pop songs on the second half of the evening, after Brooklyn Rider gave an intense, inspired performance of Janacek’s first quartet, “The Kreutzer Sonata.” Lo and behold, the second half of the program was the more exciting: not just in terms of energy and audience involvement, but in terms of the music itself.

Let’s contextualize: Not every singer could bring this off. You need one who can approach all music without prejudice, preconceptions or star mannerisms and simply communicate through song — a rare gift. Von Otter has honed the art of singing to such a point that she is purely expressive, no matter what she’s singing. Hers is not a powerhouse voice, but this only furthers her artistry. She can be brassy (in an ABBA encore, “Gimme Gimme Gimme”), she can be straightforward or she can be purely, limpidly beautiful, as she was in Anders Hillborg’s “Kväll,” lyrically accompanied by Johnny Gandelsman on solo violin, and in Caroline Shaw’s “Cant voi l’aube,” a luminous setting of a 12th-century troubadour text that was one of the evening’s standouts.

You also need a quartet that’s equally open, and Brooklyn Rider showed its formidable mettle in two instrumental masterworks — three selections from Philip Glass’s “Suite From Bent” and the Janacek — and equally fine playing in the (very good) pop arrangements. New to the quartet this season is the cellist Michael Nicholas, who has joined the group after Eric Jacobsen, one of the group’s founders, left to focus on his new post as music director of the Orlando Philharmonic; Nicholas seemed right at home on Saturday night. Jacobsen’s brother, Colin, is still one of the violinists; Nicolas Cords is the violist, whose tone, in Björk’s “Hunter,” sounded exactly like an extension of von Otter’s voice.

But: the music. Von Otter and the quartet commissioned a couple of pieces for the project, and the Shaw is unquestionably a triumph. The Muhly, though, presented as the finale of the first half, was long and empty, a rather pedestrian setting of three strong poems by C.P. Cavafy and Joyce Carol Oates. Jacobsen himself wrote “For Sixty Cents,” a setting of a Lydia Davis text that was well written for the quartet but a little angular and herky-jerky to be effective in von Otter’s voice. “Am I In Your Light,” from Adams’s “Doctor Atomic,” sounded meandering and pale — particularly after one had heard the clear focus of Björk’s “Cover Me,” or Kate Bush’s powerful “Pi.” Most of the pop songs, in deft, idiomatic, well-conceived arrangements, sounded like valid art songs in their own right. And they also spoke to the contemporary world without the labored effort that was evident in some of the first-half offerings.

Classical music, so called, doesn’t have to be so effortful, but it often is. Just a few days previously, another star mezzo-soprano performed with a string quartet in Washington: Joyce DiDonato, with the Brentano Quartet, came across very much as an Opera Singer Doing Something Different, in more conventional art-music repertoire, and wasn’t at all at her best. Von Otter, by contrast, seemed like a collaborator, a member of the band. DiDonato wore an evening gown: von Otter wore a velvet blazer, dark pants and a modified T-shirt, an upscale nod to a rock look that seemed, like her singing, completely natural. They were different evenings with different ambitions; but I liked the real-world one, with its easy virtuosity, a lot better.

[sweetest punch]

Hear 30 sec audioclips here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Many-Things-Me ... 10&sr=8-34

[johnfoyle]

Only one song by Elvis is listed for the show I'm going to in England on Friday evening. A fascinating selection all the same.

https://saffronhall.com/calendar/anne-s ... lyn-rider/

Anne Sofie von Otter mezzo-soprano
Brooklyn Rider

Philip Glass Three selections from ‘Suite from Bent’
Caroline Shaw Cant voi l´aube
Colin Jacobsen For Sixty Cents
John Adams arr. Evan Ziporyn Am I in Your Light from ‘Doctor Atomic’
Tyondai Braxton ArpRec1 from ‘The Brooklyn Rider Almanac’
Nico Muhly So Many Things
Janácek String Quartet No. 1 ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’
Björk arr. Erik Arvinder Cover Me
Björk arr. Vince Mendoza Hunter
Trad. Norwegian arr. C. Jacobsen Heimlaus and Rekveen
Elvis Costello arr. Rob Mathes Speak Darkly My Angel
Kate Bush arr. Kyle Sanna Pi