Brad Mehldau & Ian Bostridge Present: The Folly of Desire

Brad Mehldau presents The Folly of Desire, a song cycle inquiring the limits of sexual freedom in a post-#MeToo political age, together with tenor Ian Bostridge, one of the greatest song interpreters of our times. Setting poetry by Blake, Yeats, Shakespeare, Brecht, Goethe, Auden and Cummings, Mehldau’s music shifts seamlessly between a jazz idiom and Classical art song, and the work explores a theme as timeless as it is topical. The stylistic diversity of this project is underlined by adding a selection of jazz standards, as well as a Schubert lied.

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Scrolling Score: “the boys i mean are not refined”

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Brad Mehldau presents The Folly of Desire, a song cycle inquiring the limits of sexual freedom in a post-#MeToo political age, together with tenor Ian Bostridge, one of the greatest song interpreters of our times. Setting poetry by Blake, Yeats, Shakespeare, Brecht, Goethe, Auden and Cummings, Mehldau’s music shifts seamlessly between a jazz idiom and Classical art song, and the work explores a theme as timeless as it is topical. The stylistic diversity of this project is underlined by adding a selection of jazz standards, as well as a Schubert lied.

GRAMMY-Award winning jazz pianist Brad Mehldau has recorded and performed extensively since the early 1990s, and makes his Pentatone debut with The Folly of Desire. His performances and compositions convey a wide range of expression. Ian Bostridge is one of the most celebrated tenors and lied interpreters of his generation. His Pentatone recording of Schubert’s Winterreise (2019) was crowned with the ICMA Vocal Music Award 2020. Bostridge has also released Die schöne Müllerin (2020), Schwanengesang (2022) and Respighi Songs (2021) with the label.

Quote from Brad Mehldau: “I’m very excited about the opportunity to present this song cycle on Pentatone. It’s a dream come true for me to be able to share this project with the world. Ian and I have worked very hard over several years, fine-tuning our performances, and I believe the recording reflects that. It’s an important project artistically as well as personally for me, and I’m glad that an audience will have the opportunity to hear it. The physical package Pentatone has made for the CD release is beautiful.”

Quote from Ian Bostridge: “This has been a dream project for me – recording the amazing cycle by Brad which we’ve performed so many times, and recording with one of the greats some of the standards that have been close to me since childhood.”