hi,
i just received uri caines new w&w release with his interpretation of gustav mahler songs and to be honest I was really disappointed. i know the discussion about this topic in general has already been around but anyhow I really, really liked the first mahler disc urlicht. i still think it's absolutly ok to take "classic" material and transform it into something new. to my ears this worked fine on urlicht. the follow-up schuhmann disc had some interesting moments as well. with the next disc being interpretations of bach pieces the whole thing turned out to be a kind of series. this is still fine, why not draw material from the classic composers. the bach stuff also was a total mixture of genres and different ensembles, some worked fine others did not. but at this time I felt this stuff is somehow really overproduced and I started to miss the vibe. my assumption is that there is someone, maybe the guys from w&w, "producing" the music way to much. I found the mahler songs totally unfocused. A narrative speaker repeating "die Gedanken sind frei" over and over sounds terrible. The words are ok, the idea is ok but it all fells damned cold. Did anyone else listen to that disc(s)? Any thoughts?
BTW, I listened to the broetzmann/drake duo yesterday and they where producing live energy, oh yeah. ;-)
martin