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Sting And Edin Karamazov - Songs From The Labyrint (2006)
Artist: Sting And Edin Karamazov Album: Songs From The Labyrinth Date: 2006 Genre: Baroque, Classical Label/Catalog : Deutsche Grammophon #06025 170 3139# Format : Rar 4.10 (Uncompressed, 1% recovery) Size: 297,94 MB covers: All in jpg + book (32 pages) [300 dpi] rip by TheWarrior Casual pronouncements are made every so often that the lute songs (the lute is a plucked stringed instrument, an early cousin to the guitar) and madrigals of Elizabethan and Jacobean England were the popular music of their day. And Sting, who alludes to the likes of Vladimir Nabokov in his lyrics, is hardly uneducated in the legacy of fine arts, and he has a certain cerebral, inward sadness that matches the dominant mood of English music around 1600 well enough. Thus some might easily have thought it would be a short leap from Sting's own music to the lute songs of John Dowland (1563-1626). But the leap is anything but short, and Sting gets credit for having thought out fully the problems in making it. It is not just the issue of what pianist Katia Labèque, one of the classical musicians who introduced Sting to Dowland's music, called his "unschooled tenor" -- Dowland's songs are not really difficult. It is the great divide between rock (and other traditions ultimately rooted in Africa) and the European tradition: speaking in generalities, the former prizes "noise" -- sound extraneous to the pitch and to the intended timbre of an instrument or voice -- as a structural element, whereas in the latter it is strenuously eliminated. Sting's voice has plenty of "noise." The listener oriented toward classical music will object to its being there; the rock listener, noting that Sting is singing very quietly, may wonder why there isn't more of it.
Why, then, does this album work well on the whole? The short answer is that Sting took 20 years to think about how to interpret the refined melancholy of Dowland songs like "Come, Heavy Sleep." His booklet notes tell the long story of how he happened to make this album, and it's quite an interesting one, involving a "labyrinth" of encounters with Labèque, with the Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov, who performs on this album, with a friend who gave Sting a lute inlaid with a labyrinth design based on a pattern in the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France (Sting later reproduced the maze in his garden at home), and finally with a Swiss voice teacher who schooled him in pitch precision and the occasional octave run. Sting constructs two crossover points between this temporally remote music and his popular audience. First, he intersperses the songs with selections from Dowland's letters. This has surely been done before, at Elizabethan dinners and the like, and for modern listeners it has the beneficial effect of situating Dowland's music at the center of the social and political life of its time. Sting's second crossover point is more radical: he replaces the melody line in a few of Dowland's verses with multitracked harmonies, apparently consisting entirely of his own voice. These sections appear rather randomly, but they do break up the texture in a way that suggests an additional dimension of modern perspective.
Sting passes a key test for vocal music of any kind: he understands and means what he is singing. The real gloomfests among Dowland's songs -- like "Flow My Tears" and the final "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" -- lose none of their power in Sting's performances. And he brings something of his own sense of humor to the lighter ones; a certain smirk in his reading of "Come Again" suggests that he is aware an audience of Dowland's time would have heard the line "To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die with thee again" as a sexual allusion. He sounds like himself, even while purging rock's blues-based treatment of pitch from his singing; he also takes a few turns on the large archlute. And Karamazov proves an ideal collaborator, creating a sharp, edgy tone that stands up to Sting's rough voice. In making Dowland's songs his own, Sting has accomplished something that really has never been done before, and perhaps he'll show some of his own fans that Renaissance music is more than an accompaniment for silly jousting competitions -- it is a labyrinth that leads us toward the roots of our own culture. -AMG-
Track List: 01 "Walsingham" – 0:38 [instrumental] 02 "Can She Excuse My Wrongs" – 2:35 03 "Ryght Honorable..." – 0:40 [letter to Sir Robert Cecil] 04 "Flow My Tears (Lachrimae)" – 4:42 05 "Have You Seen the Bright Lily Grow" – 2:35 [lyrics: Ben Jonson, music: Robert Johnson] 06 "...Then in Time Passing On..." – 0:32 [continuation of letter] 07 "The Battle Galliard" – 3:01 08 "The Lowest Trees Have Tops" [lyrics by Sir Edward Dyer] – 2:16 09 "... And Accordinge as I Desired Ther Cam a Letter..." – 0:55 10 "Fine Knacks for Ladies" – 1:50 11 "...From Thence I Went to Landgrave of Hessen..." – 0:24 12 "Fantasy" – 2:42 13 "Come, Heavy Sleep" – 3:46 14 "Forlorn Hope Fancy" – 3:08 15 "...And from Thence I Had Great Desire to See Italy..." – 0:28 16 "Come Again" – 2:56 17 "Wilt Thou Unkind Thus Reave Me" – 2:40 18 "...After My Departures I Caled to Mynde..." – 0:30 19 "Weep You No More, Sad Fountains" – 2:38 20 "My Lord Willoughby's Welcome Home" – 1:34 21 "Clear or Cloudy" – 2:47 22 "...Men Say That the Kinge of Spain..." – 1:01 23 "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" – 4:12
Line Up Vocals – Sting Art Direction – Fred Muenzmaier* Design [Package Design] – Richard Frankel Engineer, Mixed By – Donal Hodgson Lute, Lute [Archlute] – Edin Karamazov Mastered By – Ian Cooper Mixed By [Assistant] – Iain Gore Music By – John Dowland (tracks: 1 to 4, 6 to 23) Photography – Kasskara Photography [Lute Labyrinth Sound-board Inlay] – Michael O'Neill Producer, Performer, Arranged By – Edin Karamazov, Sting [Sound Designer] – Kipper Eldridge*
