Mehldau: The Folly of Desire Brad Mehldau & Ian Bostridge

• Brad Mehldau (b. 1970): The Folly of Desire:
• 1 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: The Sick Rose 01:42
• 2 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: Leda and the Swan 04:17
• 3 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: Sonnet 147 02:55
• 4 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: Sonnet 75 02:49
• 5 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: Über die Verführung von Engeln 03:14
• 6 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: Ganymede I 06:27
• 7 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: Ganymede II 03:28
• 8 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: the boys i mean are not refined 04:50
• 9 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: Sailing to Byzantium 02:22
• 10 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: Night II 06:41
• 11 Mehldau: The Folly of Desire: Lullaby 07:54
• Jack Strachey (1894 - 1972): These foolish things:
• 12 Strachey: These foolish things 05:12
• David Mann (1940 - 2004): The wee small hours:
• 13 Mann: The wee small hours 03:08
• Cole Porter (1891 - 1964): Every time we say goodbye:
• 14 Porter: Every time we say goodbye 05:05
• Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828): Nacht & Träume:
• 15 Schubert: Nacht & Träume 03:47
• Cole Porter: Night & Day:
• 16 Porter: Night & Day 03:55
• Total Runtime 01:07:46

Info for Mehldau: 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.

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.

Ian Bostridge, tenor
Brad Mehldau, piano

Brad Mehldau
Mehldau’s Nonesuch debut was the 2004 solo disc Live in Tokyo. His subsequent releases on the label include six records with his trio (House on Hill, Day Is Done, Brad Mehldau Trio Live, Ode, Where Do You Start, and Blues and Ballads); collaborative albums (Love Sublime, Highway Rider, Metheny Mehldau, Metheny Mehldau Quartet, Modern Music, Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, Nearness with Joshua Redman, and Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau, and the Grammy Award–winning Finging Gabriel), and further solo albums (Live in Marciac; the eight-LP/four-CD 10 Years Solo Live, which the New York Times says “contains some of the most impressive pianism he has captured on record;” and the album he recorded during COVID-19 lockdown, Suite: April 2020, from which a majority of the proceeds went to Jazz Foundation of America’s COVID-19 Musician’s Emergency Fund).

Ian Bostridge
CBE has made regular appearances at the Salzburg, Edinburgh, Munich, Vienna, Schwarzenberg and Aldeburgh festivals. He has had residencies at the Wiener Konzerthaus, Carnegie Hall New York, Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Philharmonie Luxembourg, London’s Barbican Centre and Wigmore Hall. In 2018 Ian began an auspicious Artistic Residency with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, the first of its kind for the ensemble.

In opera, he has performed the roles Lysander (Britten A Midsummer Night’s Dream) for Opera Australia and at the Edinburgh Festival, Jeptha at the Opéra National de Paris, Tamino (Mozart Die Zauberflöte) and Jupiter (Handel Semele) for English National Opera and Peter Quint (Britten The Turn of the Screw), Don Ottavio (Mozart Don Giovanni) and Caliban (Adès The Tempest) for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. For the Bayerische Staatsoper he has sung Nerone (Monteverdi L’Incoronazione di Poppea), Tom Rakewell (Stravinsky The Rake’s Progress) and Male Chorus (Britten The Rape of Lucretia), for the Wiener Staatsoper he has sung Don Ottavio and for the Teatro alla Scala Milan he has sung Peter Quint. He has sung Aschenbach (Britten Death in Venice) for English National Opera, La Monnaie, Brussels and in Luxembourg.

Highlights of the 2019/20 season include his return to the operatic stage at the Deutsche Oper as Aschenbach Death in Venice; a tour of the USA with Brad Mehldau; performances of Schubert’s Winterreise at the Cartagena Music Festival in Colombia; a concert tour with Lucerne Festival Strings through Slovenia and Italy; Evangelist Matthew Passion in Torino and Bajazet in Handel’s Tamerlano with the Moscow State Philharmonic.

Booklet for Mehldau: The Folly of Desire