Perhaps it was all the puns about his name: the latest disc from the baritone Benjamin Appl is a kind of concept album centring around the idea of eating the forbidden fruit, and the consequences thereof. James Baillieu’s responsive, detailed piano playing supports him at every turn in bringing these songs to life.
The programme ranges widely – 19th-century Lieder, Jake Heggie, Poulenc, Marlene Dietrich being Just a Gigolo. It begins with a folk song and ends with Mahler’s Urlicht, but its core (that’s enough now) is bookended by two iterations of a gossamer piano solo version of In Paradisum from Fauré’s Requiem, and Appl intersperses the songs with brief spoken phrases from the Book of Genesis. The religious theme is a bit of a fig leaf, though: at times Appl’s delivery of those phrases is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and the bulk of the songs are concerned with decidedly unholy ideas – seduction, transgression, regret, the latter being voiced most urgently in The Ballad of Paragraph 218, Eisler and Brecht’s biting take-down of anti-abortion laws in Weimar Germany.
A few jackknife mood-changes make sense in context: Schubert’s Heidenröslein, which can seem sweet but harmless, becomes more meaningful coming after the bluesy snarl of Heggie’s song Snake – prick your finger on this rose and it won’t easily heal. In Fanny Hensel’s Die Nonne – sometimes still wrongly credited to her brother, Mendelssohn – the nun expresses an uneasy happiness that her lover is dead so that her feelings can regain their purity. Debussy was anxious that the woman who premiered La Chevelure should be a virgin (he even wrote to her mother, euphemistically, to check), since if she knew what it was about she apparently wouldn’t sing it in the right way; Appl sounds like he knows exactly what it’s about, but he and Baillieu make the song work beautifully anyway. Yet it’s the gentler, airier numbers that show Appl at his considerable best, sustaining intensity even when spinning the tiniest thread of sound, his voice all velvet smoothness.
This week’s other pick
The Honour of William Byrd, a collection of songs and viol music on BIS, offering a rounded portrait of this complicated composer – sombre and witty, Catholic yet a favourite of Elizabeth I. Songs lamenting the deaths of the courtier Philip Sidney and Byrd’s mentor Thomas Tallis stand out amid a consistently intriguing programme. Played by the Chelys Consort and flawlessly sung by the mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston, the whole thing is beautifully done.
