Jacob's ladder
Brad Mehldau
Keywords
Reviews (4)
Presto classical
2023
By
2023
"Brad Mehldau presents The Folly of Desire, a song cycle inquiring the limits of sexual freedom in a post-MeToo political age ... Setting poetry by Blake, Yeats, Shakespeare, Brecht, Goethe, Auden and Cummings, Mehldau's music shifts seamlessly between a jazz idiom and Classical art song, and the work explores a theme as timeless as it is topical. The stylistic diversity of this project is underlined by adding a selection of jazz standards, as well as a Schubert lied".
DownBeat
2023 October
By
By
Michael J. West
2023 October
"Brad Mehldau refers to The Folly Of Desire as "an inquiry into the limits of sexual freedom in a post-#MeToo political age." Heavy stuff; heavier still when it's expressed through Shakespeare, Blake and Goethe poems. The mostly through-composed settings for piano (Mehldau) and operatic male voice (English tenor Ian Bostridge) aren't easier to digest".
BBC music magazine
2023 August
By
By
Paul Riley (musikanmelder)
2023 August
"With 'The Folly of Desire', Mehldau has forged a sassy, boundary-blurring cycle that oozes empathy, erotic frisson and a big heart ... The recording couples it with songs by Cole Porter and the like, plus Schubert's 'Nacht und Träume'. Ever-fastidious, Bostridge's mannerisms sometimes sound about as comfortable in the popular numbers as Mary Poppins singing Meatloaf. Mehldau's pianism, however, is peerless, and in any case the 'main event' is his cycle which rises to the occasion with an aplomb born of the dazzling fluency of his harmonic imagination and ability to create vocal lines that mostly fit Bostridge like a glove".
The gramophone
2023 November
By
By
David Patrick Stearns
2023 November
"Any consensus on 'The Folly of Desire' is years away: this polystylistic work is built on a number of dense poems that are better contemplated on the page than in the finite time zone allowed by music. At times, moments of startling insight are apparent amid a juxtaposition of highly independent vocal lines and pianistic activity - plus Bostridge's network of interpretative techniques ... The vocal lines test Bostridge's limits both high and low ... Mehldau's pianism is a bit shy, sometimes unwilling to probe his own textures to find richer meaning".