Paradise Lost

Anna Prohaska (soprano) & Julius Drake (piano)

Following her award-winning album Serpent and Fire (which focused on Dido and Cleopatra), Prohaska teams up with Julius Drake for this exploration of representations of Eve; the programme includes music by Purcell, Messiaen, Fauré, Wolf, Reimann, Brahms, Stravinsky, Ravel and Bernstein.

The gestation of this project lasted two years. Anna Prohaska and Julius Drake finally concentrated their research on the themes of Eve, Paradise and banishment. Some songs were obvious choices, such as Fauré’s Paradis, in which God appears to Eve and asks her to name each flower and animal, or Purcell’s Sleep, Adam, sleep with its references to Genesis. But Anna Prohaska also wished to illustrate the cliché of the woman who brought original sin into the world and her status as a tempter who leads man astray, as in Brahms’s Salamander, Wolf’s Die Bekehrte or Ravel’s Air du Feu. In Das Paradies und die Peri, Schumann conjures up the image of Syria’s rose-covered plains. Bernstein also transports us to the desert with Silhouette. John Milton’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Paradise Lost was the inspiration for Charles Ives and Benjamin Britten, also featured in this very rich programme that constitutes an invitation to travel and reflection.

anon.:
 I will give my love an apple

Bernstein:
 Silhouette (Galilee)

Brahms:
 Salamander, Op. 107 No. 2

Britten:
 A Poison Tree (Blake)

Crumb, G:
 Wind Elegy

Debussy:
 Apparition - song (1884)

Eisler:
 5 Elegies

Fauré:
 Paradis (No. 1 from La chanson d'Eve, Op. 95)

Ives, C:
 Evening

Lesur:
 Ce qu'Adam dit à Ève

Mahler:
 Das irdische Leben (Des Knaben Wunderhorn)

Messiaen:
 Bonjour toi, colombe verte

Pfitzner:
 Röschen biß den Apfel an

Purcell:
 Sleep, Adam, and take thy rest, Z195

Rachmaninov:
 'A-oo', Op.38, No. 6

Ravel:
 Air du Feu: “Arrière…” from L'enfant et les sortilèges

Reimann, A:
 Gib mir den Apfel

Schubert:
 Abendstern, D806
 Auflösung, D807

Schumann:
 Jetzt sank des Abends gold'ner Schein (from Das Paradies und die Peri)
 Warte, warte, wilder Schiffmann (No. 6 from Liederkreis Op. 24)

Stravinsky:
 Pastorale

Wolf, H:
 Goethe-Lieder