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.
