2023-08-21 12:31:17
“I will give my love to an Apple.” It begins puristically, with an unaccompanied, anonymous Renaissance song that hits the mark, better red: namely an apple. And then we already know where we are. The singer himself explains it to us: “And the Lord God took man and put him in the Garden of Eden.”
Benjamin Appl is the name of the baritone who speaks as well as sings. And with his latest CD, he embarks on an exceptionally beautiful, even seductive song parcours into paradise. Where anything goes, nothing has to, for Adam and Eve indulging in sensual pleasures. Only the apple should remain taboo. It turned out differently. And of course it was Eve’s fault.
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Benjamin Appl doesn’t say that, he just sings about it. But only once, after his congenial piano partner James Ballieu was allowed to evoke the heavenly joys of Fauré’s “In paradisum” in sparkling instrumental form, there is love, sighing, moaning and also – clearly deflowered. With Ivor Gurney and Hugo Wolf, who lets Jupiter adore his cupbearer Ganymede, while Kurt Weill innocently evokes the aura of longing on the fairy island of Youkali in French.
With Debussy’s “La Chevelure”, the sensually flattering hair becomes a substitute symbol for what the Bible describes as “And they became one flesh”. The French have always been good at metaphors. But Benjamin Appl doesn’t mince his words. He relishes the name of his new album, which makes him sound relaxed and liberated, “Forbidden Fruit”.
This walk through 26 songs from the 19th to the 21st century is not just about the oh so sweet fruits in the neighbor’s garden. Cleverly collaged together, Appl reflects on the total liberality of our world, which doesn’t make us happy, and reflects it in this motley mixture of songs between temptation and the fall of man.
Gretchen and Heideröslein
There it goes with Schönberg in the cabaret and with Casucci’s “Just a Gigolo” on the chanson stage. And in the end, a disillusioned pregnant woman stands before the abortion doctor who mocks her with Brecht/Eisler in the “Ballade vom Paragraph 218”.
On the way from Elysium to apple bite and exodus from paradise, Reynaldo Hahn, Richard Strauss, Francis Poulenc, Edward Grieg, Fanny Hensel and Jake Heggie come to sound with surprising facets of meaning in various song comments. A certain Lothar Brühne once had Zarah Leander and now Appl, not at all inappropriately, asking: “Can love be a sin?”
The versatile, vocally flirty Appl, who then again seriously conjures up the art of song, becomes incredibly clear when, with Schubert, he lets the not at all innocent rape fantasy of “Heideröslein” seamlessly transition into the very obviously pregnant “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, whose rest is pretty much gone.
Benjamin Appls “Forbidden Fruit”
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And then, with biting irony, Appl swings the moral club of the tragic “Wilhelm Meister” Haffner in Schumann’s “Who never ate his bread with tears”. At the end of the 70 minutes he ends it metaphysically. Mankind has been thrown out of paradise, but it still has Nietzsche and Mahler’s spacious, comforting setting of his “Urlicht”. It makes you want to nibble on the forbidden fruit again.
The former Regensburger Domspatz, last Fischer-Dieskau student and qualified business economist Appl is 41 years old. In 2017 he caused a sensation with the CD “Heimat” which, in addition to his engaging voice, also revealed a talent for original repertoire compilations. Works by Kit Armstrong, György Kurtág, Nico Muhly and Matthias Pintscher were written especially for him.
Most recently, he inspired audiences in an anthology of the completely unknown orchestral songs by Hans Sommer. Appl complements Schubert’s “Winterreise”, which he recorded in a very puristically harsh but also full of passion, for concert use in an unusual and gripping manner with excerpts from the diaries and writings of participants in the Austrian- Hungarian North Pole Expeditions in 1872-1874.
Appl can be a purist, but he also appreciates the twist: whether it’s dancing the tango in Buenos Aires in the film project “Breaking Music” or singing Schubert for another BBC film, a snowstorm raging around the 2284 meter high artificial tower of the Julier Pass in Graubünden, Switzerland.
He recently made up his debut in New York’s Carnegie Hall, which had been postponed due to Corona. And the opera is knocking on the door again. With the elderly Hungarian Holocaust survivor Eva Fahidi, he repeatedly denies a subtle program of remembrance.
And with the International Song Center Heidelberg, a spin-off of the Heidelberg Spring Festival, he is campaigning for German-language songs to become UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. Until this goal is reached, a few paradise apples will have to believe in it.
Benjamin Appl: Forbidden Fruit (Alpha Classics). On August 30th and 31st he sings at the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
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