A huge setting sun bathes this Monday, July 25, which welcomes, under the acoustic shell of the Parc floral de Vincennes, the unusual duo formed by the American jazz pianist Brad Mehldau and the British tenor Ian Bostridge. The two met in 2015, when each was scheduled at the prestigious Schloss Elmau venue in Germany.
From their eclecticism and a common taste for jazz, lied, Bach and Schumann, was born a cycle of melodies, The Folly of Desire, jazzman’s tribute to 19th century German musice century, premiered in January 2019, revived in February at the Philharmonie de Paris. The two performers arrive from the Verbier Festival, in Switzerland, where they gave it the day before.
Complemented by the Schumann lieder cycle of the poet love (“the loves of the poet”), it’s around the excesses of desire and love and “on the limits of post-#metoo romantic irony”, as Brad Mehldau points out, that the eleven texts by male authors are articulated, from Shakespeare to WH Auden, from Goethe to William Blake, via Brecht, William Butler Yeats and EE Cummings. A powerfully golden light floods the stage when the pianist plays the few introductory notes of The Sick Rose (William Blake), a music with depressive connotations, which will be followed by the lively and brutal Leda and the Swan, by Yeats. No jazzy vocals in this music, between tonality and modality, which sometimes flirts with the ballad, as in the Sonnet 147 of Shakespeare, followed by the lyric Sonnet 75.
At the heart of the human abyss
The green parakeets of the Floral Park woke up with the satirical About the seduction of angels, by Bertolt Brecht, more Germanic stylistic hook and dark mood, where “the duplicity and self-satisfaction of the rapist protagonist” (says Mehldau). Ian Bostridge has long been a master of prosody. Each consonant clicks, each vowel generates its own color. Always theatrical in his expression, sometimes with a crazy extroversion, the tenor invests each word, sometimes at the limits of speech or cry, not hesitating to make things ugly if it is to serve the text. The wind has started to play with the scores, but Mehldau’s playing, fluid and tense at the same time, seems to plunge into the heart of the human abyss.
Two evocations of the abduction of Ganymede – the ecstatic one of Shakespeare, then the more violent, disillusioned one of Auden – pursue their path of beauty. The subversive The Boys I Mean Are Not Refined, by Cummings, will take on the appearance of a parody, appropriating the boastful swaying of ragtime in a playful and grating atmosphere. A simple chord, then the voice of solitude for the contemplative Excerpt from Sailing to Byzantium, by Yeats. Before the piano multiplies little by little in Night II (from the Four Zoas), by Blake, whose postlude takes up the melody in the manner of Schumann. The melancholy Lullaby, d’Auden, who solicits the bass of the singer, closes the first part of the recital.
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