Carolyn Sampson, Elysium

 Carolyn Sampson, Elysium, A Schubert Recital (BIS) 

 

I don't need much persuading to buy a new Carolyn Sampson album and when the wireless played Wiegenlied, D.867, the other day it was very soon on its way. There's nothing too demanding about this beguiling lullaby apart from the need to hear it again and even, with access to a piano, to risk getting on the nerves of one's long-suffering hosts by working out the accompaniment which, for a musician of zero talent like me, can be a tortuous process. James Middleton's senstive touch is much the preferred option.

The other 16 tracks then have to live up to the standard set by the stand-out item so accurately identified by the Radio 3 programme makers.

The theme of Elysium has already highlighted that we are looking 'beyond the flux of time' which is where Auf dem Wasser zu singen takes us. It was Coleridge who suggested that we need to 'suspend disbelief' and he had a point but these are the early salad days of Romanticism, before it all got out of hand, and so one is keen to allow them that. Otherwise one denies onself Schubert's gorgeous accompaniments to the somewhat indulgent texts of the favourite poets whose words he chose to set. The rippling waters of Auf dem Wasser is only the beginning.

Litanei auf das Fest Allerseelen prays for any number of people's souls to rest in peace, among them,

those sated with life,

but we are throughout half in love with death and the outlandish promises of paradise.

I was disappointed in my German-English dictionary in that it didn't have Musensohn whereas it happily translates Vietnam, Myanmar and 'postmodern' from German to English. Musensohn is almost as easy, though, when it turns out to be 'son of the muses'. I'm not sure it should really take two years to reach 'O' level standard German.

Carolyn Sampson is crisp and gorgeous from the Monteverdi Verspers I first saw her in, through Handel opera, lied and English song so it almost seems like a waste that the last track, Abschied von der Erde, is spoken although what it says,

Farewell, beautiful earth!

I can understand you only now,

when joy and sorrow

pass away from us,

 

which puts some useful distance between the problematic thoughts and feelings we find ourselves trapped in and the idea of something beyond them.

We are taken elsewhere by these gentle songs and we are well advised to let them. It is likely to take a while before this album is filed on the shelves. It's an idyllic thing to be able to return to and likely to be played several more times before being put next to the Schubert song cycles.