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Sting - Songs From The Labyrinth
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Artist...............: Sting
Album................: Songs From The Labyrinth
Genre................: Classical
Source...............: CD
Year.................: 2006
Ripper...............: Exact Audio Copy (Secure mode) &
Codec................: Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)
Version..............: reference libFLAC 1.1.2 20050205
Quality..............: Lossless, (avg. compression: 54 %)
Channels.............: Stereo / 44100 HZ / 16 Bit
Tags.................: VorbisComment
Ripped by............: flaboy on 5/9/2007
Posted by............: flaboy on 5/10/2007
News Group(s)........: alt.binaries.sounds.lossless
Included.............: NFO, LOG, PAR v2, CUE
Covers...............: Front Back CD
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Tracklisting
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1. (00:00:38) Sting - Walsingham
2. (00:02:36) Sting - Can She Excuse My Wrongs
3. (00:00:41) Sting - 'Ryght Honorable...'
4. (00:04:42) Sting - Flow My Tears (Lachrimae)
5. (00:02:36) Sting - Have You Seen The Bright lily Grow
6. (00:00:32) Sting - '...Then In Time Passing On...'
7. (00:03:01) Sting - The Battle Galliard
8. (00:02:16) Sting - The Lowest Trees Have Tops
9. (00:00:56) Sting - '...And Accordinge As I Desired Ther Cam A Letter...'
10. (00:01:51) Sting - Fine Knacks For Ladies
11. (00:00:25) Sting - '...From Thenc I Went To The Landgrave Of Hessen...'
12. (00:02:43) Sting - Fantasy
13. (00:03:46) Sting - Come, Heavy Sleep
14. (00:03:08) Sting - Forlorn Hope Fancy
15. (00:00:29) Sting - '...And From Thence I Had Great Desire To See Italy...'
16. (00:02:56) Sting - Come Again
17. (00:02:40) Sting - Wilt Thou Unkind Thus Reave Me
18. (00:00:30) Sting - '...After My Departure I Caled To Mynde...'
19. (00:02:39) Sting - Weep You No More, Sad Fountains
20. (00:01:35) Sting - My Lord Willoughby's Welcome Home
21. (00:02:48) Sting - Clear Or Cloudy
22. (00:01:01) Sting - '...Men Say That The Kinge Of Spain...'
23. (00:04:12) Sting - In Darkness Let Me Dwell
Playing Time.........: 00:48:39
Total Size...........: 271.31 MB
NFO generated on.....: 5/9/2007 12:56:04 PM
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All Music Review by James Manheim
Casual pronouncements are made every so often that the lute songs (the
lute is a plucked stringed instrument, an early cousin to the guitar) and
madrigals of Elizabethan and Jacobean England were the popular music of
their day. And Sting, who alludes to the likes of Vladimir Nabokov in his lyrics,
is hardly uneducated in the legacy of fine arts, and he has a certain cerebral,
inward sadness that matches the dominant mood of English music around
1600 well enough. Thus some might easily have thought it would be a short
leap from Sting's own music to the lute songs of John Dowland (1563-1626).
But the leap is anything but short, and Sting gets credit for having thought
out fully the problems in making it. It is not just the issue of what pianist Katia Labèque, one of
the classical musicians who introduced Sting to Dowland's
music, called his "unschooled tenor" Dowland's songs are not really
difficult. It is the great divide between rock (and other traditions ultimately
rooted in Africa) and the European tradition: speaking in generalities, the
former prizes "noise" sound extraneous to the pitch and to the intended
timbre of an instrument or voice as a structural element, whereas in the
latter it is strenuously eliminated. Sting's voice has plenty of "noise." The
listener oriented toward classical music will object to its being there; the rock
listener, noting that Sting is singing very quietly, may wonder why there isn't
more of it.
Why, then, does this album work well on the whole? The short answer is that
Sting took 20 years to think about how to interpret the refined melancholy of
Dowland songs like "Come, Heavy Sleep." His booklet notes tell the long story
of how he happened to make this album, and it's quite an interesting one,
involving a "labyrinth" of encounters with Labèque, with the Bosnian lutenist
Edin Karamazov, who performs on this album, with a friend who gave Sting a
lute inlaid with a labyrinth design based on a pattern in the floor of Chartres
Cathedral in France (Sting later reproduced the maze in his garden at home),
and finally with a Swiss voice teacher who schooled him in pitch precision and
the occasional octave run. Sting constructs two crossover points between
this temporally remote music and his popular audience. First, he intersperses
the songs with selections from Dowland's letters. This has surely been done
before, at Elizabethan dinners and the like, and for modern listeners it has
the beneficial effect of situating Dowland's music at the center of the social
and political life of its time. Sting's second crossover point is more radical: he
replaces the melody line in a few of Dowland's verses with multitracked
harmonies, apparently consisting entirely of his own voice. These sections
appear rather randomly, but they do break up the texture in a way that
suggests an additional dimension of modern perspective.
Sting passes a key test for vocal music of any kind: he understands and
means what he is singing. The real gloomfests among Dowland's songs like
"Flow My Tears" and the final "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" lose none of their
power in Sting's performances. And he brings something of his own sense of
humor to the lighter ones; a certain smirk in his reading of "Come Again"
suggests that he is aware an audience of Dowland's time would have heard
the line "To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die with thee again" as a sexual
allusion. He sounds like himself, even while purging rock's blues-based
treatment of pitch from his singing; he also takes a few turns on the large
archlute. And Karamazov proves an ideal collaborator, creating a sharp, edgy
tone that stands up to Sting's rough voice. In making Dowland's songs his
own, Sting has accomplished something that really has never been done
before, and perhaps he'll show some of his own fans that Renaissance music
is more than an accompaniment for silly jousting competitions it is a
labyrinth that leads us toward the roots of our own culture.
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