Brad Mehldau The Folly of Desire; plus songs by D Mann, C Porter, Schubert and Strachey Ian Bostridge (tenor), Brad Mehldau (piano) Pentatone PTC 5187 035 67:56 mins
Is the state of desire a folly? That’s the question posed by Brad Mehldau in a song cycle whose breadth of texts – Shakespeare and Blake to Brecht and ee cummings – engorges reflections around power, consent and #MeToo. In the liner notes Mehldau admits that his original conception was to chart a ‘spiritual climb from pure lust… to lust-free love’. But life isn’t that simple, and the final ordering shakes things up into something more calculatedly messy – like love itself. The result, he suggests, ‘is an enquiry into the limits of sexual freedom’.
Conceived with tenor Ian Bostridge in mind, there’s no doubting the cycle’s bold ambition. Setting the bar high, in live performances they’ve paired it with Schumann’s Dichterliebe. The recording, however, couples it with songs by Cole Porter and the like, plus Schubert’s Nacht und Traume. 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. Brecht’s musings on sex with angels spawns an artfully calculated love child of Schumann and Berg, while some of the juxtapositions deliberately startle: ee cummings’s ‘the boys i mean are not refined’, set with thrusting raunchiness and relish for a vocabulary that takes no hostages, prefaces a serenely-gilded segment of Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. With The Folly of Desire, Mehldau has forged a sassy, boundary-blurring cycle that oozes empathy, erotic frisson and a big heart.
Paul Riley