Ian Bostridge & Antonio Pappano – Requiem: The Pity of War (2018) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Two composers who in one way or another sang about the horrors of war, and two who lost their lives in it: Ian Bostridge’s takes a successful gamble here, with masterful accompaniment on the piano by Antonio Pappano. The first two are from Kurt Weill with Four Walt Whitman Songs in which the poet laments over the soldiers who died in the War of Succession, and Gustav Mahler, three of whose Lieder(s) taken from Knaben Wunderhorncruelly and repugnantly evoke the lives of poor young people, peasants and people who are barely through with their school years, sent to be torn apart on every possible and imaginable front. More directly concerned, if one may say so, are George Butterworth – who fell at the Somme in 1916, aged thirty-one, and whose A Shropshire Lad is without a doubt the greatest masterpiece here. Rudi Stephan fell at the Galician front in 1915 aged twenty-eight. His cycle Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied is a climax of unsettling eroticism… Would the fate of German music have been different if this genius had been able to act as a counterbalance, for example, to the emerging dodecaphonic music? Bostridge gives it his all here in this sad centenary of the end of the “war to end all wars”, which we know was tragically not the case.

Tracklist:
1. A Shropshire Lad: I. “Loveliest of trees” 02:38
2. A Shropshire Lad: II. “When I was one-and-twenty” 01:16
3. A Shropshire Lad: III. “Look not in my eyes” 01:52
4. A Shropshire Lad: IV. “Think no more, lad” 01:15
5. A Shropshire Lad: V. “The lads in their hundreds” 02:07
6. A Shropshire Lad: VI. “Is my team ploughing?” 03:07
7. Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied: I. Kythere 01:38
8. Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied: II. Pantherlied 47
9. Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied: III. Abendfrieden 01:24
10. Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied: IV. In Nachbars Garten 01:56
11. Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied: V. Glück zu Zweien 01:42
12. Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied: VI. Das Hohelied der Nacht 01:45
13. Four Walt Whitman Songs: I. “Beat! Beat! Drums!” 03:21
14. Four Walt Whitman Songs: II. “Oh captain! My captain!” 04:36
15. Four Walt Whitman Songs: III. “Come up from the fields, father” 05:13
16. Four Walt Whitman Songs: IV. Dirge for Two Veterans 04:23
17. Des Knaben Wunderhorn: XI. Revelge 06:45
18. Des Knaben Wunderhorn: IX. Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen 06:33
19. Des Knaben Wunderhorn: XII. Der Tamboursg’sell 05:55