Search - Zoltan Kodaly, John Dowland, Benjamin Britten :: Melankoli

MELANKOLI

Lindberg Lyd AS | Norway | 07/12/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As its Norwegian title proclaims, this recording is the latest to harp on the well-worn theme of the viola's irredeemably melancholic character. Edvard Munch's painting of that name adorns the cover and the informative liner notes, written by Morten Carlsen, are prefaced by relevant poems in the appropriate language by Vinje, Goethe and Byron. Seventy-two minutes later I felt like retorting with Keats that 'shade to shade will come too drowsily / and drown the wakeful anguish of the soul'!
With that off my chest, I can happily report that Carlsen, who has held leading orchestral positions in Bonn, Stuttgart and Oslo and teaches at the Norwegian Academy of Music, is an excellent player with bags of interpretative ideas and the wherewithal to realise them. He plays with a consistently beautiful tone and an eloquent expressivity, exhibiting an unusually wide palette of tone colours and vibrato. Britten's Lachrymae, in a well-structured performance, is preceded by the song by Dowland upon which it is based, an illuminating coupling that should be done more often. Later on, the well-known Brahms songs are preceded by the minute-long canon for voice and viola he wrote for the Joachims. The songs themselves are played more flowingly than usual and are all the better for it. A searing performance of Kodály's Adagio opens the CD, and the remaining items are given idiomatic interpretations, well caught by the excellent recording.

Carlos María Solare, The Strad Magazine, February 2002"