What the classical world has been listening to this month
Andrew Armstrong Pianist
I can’t get enough of the way the music and words speak to each other in Richard Strauss’s songs, sometimes at odds, sometimes complimentarily. In ‘Morgen’, it happens in such fabulous ways, with the piano and vocal line almost behaving as if they have nothing to do with each other, but they eventually line up and interweave just at the moment the words say, ‘We will be re-united.’ In my favourite recording, the comforting tenderness of baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is miraculous, and accompanist Gerald Moore is one of the greatest ever.
When I was a little boy, we’d go on family trips and my parents would put on a lot of Ella Fitzgerald. I was determined to marry her, because of the perfection of her voice – it sounded like it was caressing you through the speakers, and her tone was so smooth, full and loving. No song exemplifies that more than ‘Misty’, in which the singer is helpless but is luxuriating in that helplessness. There’s a feeling that one is lucky to be in that state, and hopes never to be rescued.
Nina Simone’s ‘Don’t explain’ is one of the most devastating songs I’ve ever heard. Again there’s a sense of helplessness, but in this case it aches – she sings ‘I don’t want to hear folks chatter because I know you cheat’, but she makes it clear that her love is with him and there is no alternative. In the space between the notes in the piano accompaniment, you can feel the clock ticking through those moments and no-one hurrying anywhere – she’s stuck here for the long term.
And also…
Our youngest child, Gabriel, is six years old, and there’s nothing better than sitting on a comfortable chair together and reading. He’s still at that age when he doesn’t know that learning is supposed to make him furrow his brow, and like a moth to a flame he swoops on a word he doesn’t recognise and asks me to explain it. He’s currently in a massive Roald Dahl phase, especially James and the Giant Peach.
Andrew Armstrong’s new ‘In Blue’ recording of Gershwin, Still, Kernis et al is out on 26 January
Jess Dandy Contralto & mezzo
I have been listening to ‘Das Wirtshaus’ from Schubert’s Winterreise so often lately that I am no longer sure where I end and it begins. My interpretation of choice features Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore. I feel the tender warmth of Moore’s surrender to an F major half-sound like the welcome pain of blood returning
