Love Sublime

Brad Mehldau (Composer), Brad Mehldau (Performer), Renée Fleming (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Brad Mehldau, Renée Fleming
• Composer: Brad Mehldau
• Audio CD (June 27, 2006)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Nonesuch
• ASIN: B000FIMHFI
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #156,885 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Seven years after drawing inspiration from Rainer Maria Rilke on his Elegiac Cycle, a classical-style work for solo piano, young jazz star Brad Mehldau hooks up with the great American soprano Renee Fleming to delve further into the German poet's output in a setting of his earlier Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. Commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the seven-song cycle is at times a bit sketchy in outlining rather than sinking into the aching emotion, but there is no denying the exquisite pain of "Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you" or the ease with which Mehldau tailors his restless, varied rhythmic attack to the words and Fleming's dynamic delivery of them. (The diva recently worked with two other noted jazz artists, Fred Hersch and Bill Frisell, on Haunted Heart, her less-rewarding album of pop, folk and jazz standards.) Love Sublime also features serviceable settings of three lyrically gripping poems by Louise Bogan (who wrote articles about Rilke as the New Yorker's longtime poetry critic). The title track is a reworking of a song Mehldau previously recorded as an instrumental, this time featuring sharply penetrating words by his wife, vocalist Fleurine. --Lloyd Sachs

Product Description

A collection of duets for voice and piano, Love Sublime is based on the writings of poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Louise Bogan and addresses faith and doubt, youth and aging, male and female, romantic yearning and mature reflection. The voices of the writers are very much present in the melodies and rhythms of Love Sublime.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Swoops and swoons from Fleming in song cycles specially written for her, January 3, 2007

By 

Jazz Online - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love Sublime (Audio CD)

This is an intensely beautiful album from two gifted artists of today. Here is a superb review from Gramophone Magazine that precisely summarizes the work and this album.

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Renée Flemming is a fan of the maverick jazz pianist/composer Brad Mehldau, and thanks to her Carnegie Hall commissioned this pair of song-cyles. Mehldau is a deep thinder when it comes to compositional technique and structure. Thus, while at first hearing it may seem that there's little or no tone-painting in the selections from The Blue Estuaries (based on poems by Louise Bogan), further listening reveals subtle associations. In "Tears in Sleep," for example, the vocal line slides over slippery harmonies, suggesting dreamy restlesness.

Mehldau's setting of poems from Rilke's early, angst-ridden collection The Book of Hours is more overtly descriptive. The desolate, chiming piano part of "Your first word was light" is an ideal foil for the soprano's tortured entreaties. In "I love you, gentlest of ways," the spare, hymn-like opening becomes quietly awesome, underlining the sudden weight of the line "you, the forest that always surrounded us." The bluesy, syncopated character of "I love the dark hours of my being" may come as a surprise, however - though as the harmonies grow more exploratory, the song begins to sound like an Expressionist spiritual, which is somehow apt. Love Sublime, served here as an encore, is an exquisitely melancholy mélodie that Fauré surely would have loved.

Fleming sings with plush tone and deep feeling, often sacrificing textural clarity in the process, and her swoops and swoons help bring out the connections to jazz. Her approach works, though it would be fascinating to hear this music sung in a purer, cleaner style. As for Mehldau, his playing is simply brilliant.

Andrew Farach-Colton, Gramophone Magazine

35 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars double darn..., June 29, 2006

By 

svf - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love Sublime (Audio CD)

With the major record labels ruthlessly shrinking or dissolving their classical and jazz divisions these days, it was rather unique to see two new Warner/Nonesuch label Brad Mehldau CDs -- House On Hill with his acclaimed jazz trio and Love Sublime, a collaboration with superstar operatic soprano Renee Fleming -- released on the same day this week. But unfortunately, this is probably the most remarkable thing about these two albums.

Jazz-lover Renee Fleming worked with Fred Hersch and Bill Frisell on last year's classier-than-average quasi-"classical crossover" project Haunted Heart. Love Sublime is a more somber affair, with a program of Mehldau's original settings of poems by Rilke and Louise Bogan for voice and piano.

You'd like to give Brad an A for Effort here, but while his attempts at modern-day lieder would probably be well received at a composition class recital, they don't seem quite ready for "prime time." His tempos are consistently on the languid, meandering side, and the quite chromatic but not-quite-atonal murky harmonic language hovers somewhere around late Scriabin and early Alban Berg, but without the sizzle on the proverbial steak. Mehldau also avoids anything resembling a melody with a vengeance in these "art songs" -- which is unfortunate when you've got Renee Fleming on hand to sing for you.

It turns out that the most successful performance on Love Sublime, the closing title song, is a vocal adaptation of a tune from Mehldau's excellent Places album. I'd love to hear more arrangements like this performed by this dynamic duo instead.

Darn. Make that double darn.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Labor of love, perhaps, but earthbound., February 18, 2007

By 

Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love Sublime (Audio CD)

I thought my expectations for this meeting were reasonably in line--I didn't expect a "Dichterliebe" or "Winterreise" but, knowing the credentials and talents of both artists, was prepared for some engaging melodies and harmonies, perhaps revealing Mehldau's love of Brahms or Mahler, and some incisive and infectious if not jazzy rhythmic accompaniment suggestive of Shostakovich or Stravinsky. What's most disappointing about the album is that after listening to it once (hardly sufficient, I realize, for an informed review), I find myself lacking any motivation to explore it further.

Mehldau's ambiguous tonalities (12-tone serialism or simply impressionistic color splashes?) often reflect the mood of a text, but rarely does the piano rise to the challenge of becoming a major player or discrete voice in the drama within the poem. Fleming deserves praise for what must have been exceptionally challenging music--melodies that are frequently elliptical, angular, rhythmically and harmonically off-center--but sometimes all of the talent, effort, and accomplishment do not add up to a moving or illuminating aesthetic result. (Why is the diva's diction, which was so clear on "Haunted Heart," so difficult to understand here? I frequently converse with a "classically-trained" vocalist who insists that legit singing, when done properly, should be no more unintelligible than popular singing.)

I have never heard in Mehldau's "jazz" playing the "singing" romanticism with which he is frequently associated (the comparisons with Bill Evans I would object to as vigorously as Mehldau himself does). Perhaps if the two artists had elected to go with a less abstract, more programmatic narrative/dramatic text, such as those favored by Shubert/Schumann, the result of this quest for a Love Sublime would have been more focused, purposeful, and inarguably successful as a shared experience. (I notice that even the "favorable" reviews speak more to the "project" than to the music itself. Was anyone "moved" by it?)