CDS of the week: three new releases
Leonard Cohen: You Want it Darker Columbia £9.99 ★★★★
Leonard Cohen’s 14th studio album is a “bleak masterpiece for hard times from pop’s longest-serving poet”, said Neil Mccormick in The Daily Telegraph. At 82 years old, Cohen is producing music – almost miraculously – as “rich, deep and potent as ever”. And, if anything, his “ruminations on life gain added poignancy and urgency with passing time”.
You Want it Darker arrives packed with songs – from Leaving the Table to Steer Your Way – that reference mortality and religious faith, songs you could interpret as “reflective farewells”, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. The first sound you hear is a choir from the Montreal synagogue in which Cohen’s family worshipped, and the last is Cohen “apparently addressing Jesus” with a certain finality: “It’s over now, the water and the wine… I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine.” Of course, reflective farewells have always been a Cohen theme. But if this brilliant record does indeed turn out to be his last, there are far worse ways to bow out.
Lady Gaga: Joanne Polydor £12.99 ★★★
Joanne is Lady Gaga’s best album in five years, said Rob Sheffield on Rollingstone. com – her finest moment since the “discostick hair-metal manifesto” that was Born
This Way, and a joyous return to form following the “overheated yet practically song-free” Artpop. It’s as if Gaga has started over with “an old-school 1990s softrock album, heavy on the acoustic guitar” and featuring music that feels “strippeddown, restrained, modest and other adjectives that you wouldn’t usually associate with her”. It’s Lady Gaga, but with “the incense-and-patchouli hippie vibe of Sarah Mclachlan and the cowgirl glitter of Shania Twain”. And it works beautifully.
It does in parts, said Michael Cragg in The Observer. Better in its softer moments – Angel Down is “an intoxicating lament that twinkles and wheezes in equal measure” – the album’s country and rock influences are “writ so large it takes a while to settle”. Overall, though, this is a “career-extending, creative curio that, even in its weaker moments” is never dull.
Schoenberg: Gurre-lieder Bergen Philharmonic/ Edward Gardner Chandos £24 ★★★★
“From the fiery furnace of the English National Opera to the cleansing downpours of Bergen in Norway: that’s the career path of Edward Gardner”, who is just starting his second year as the principal conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic, said Geoff Brown in The Times. Taking on Schoenberg’s stormy Gurre-lieder – requiring 150 instrumentalists and a tottering choir of 200 – is “not for wimps”. But in this superb version, recorded over four days but with the “dynamism of a single live performance”, Gardner pulls it off brilliantly, creating a “luminous atmosphere and edge-of-the-seat excitement”.
It’s a shame for Chandos that Hyperion’s excellent Cologne recording of Schoenberg’s epic cantata has won Gramophone’s award for the best choral release of the year, said Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. I prefer this one, especially for its supreme technical quality and more “balanced cast”. “The playing and singing of Gardner’s Bergen forces are as intoxicating as any I know on disc.”
Stars reflect the overall quality of reviews and our own independent assessment (4 stars = don’t miss; 1 star = don’t bother)