10/15/2016 TLSRufus does Shakespeare – TheTLS

ARTS MAY 25 2016 Rufus does Shakespeare CHARLES SHAFAIEH

Rufus Wainwright, a melancholic troubadour who fuses the sensitive passion of Jacques Brel with the high theatrics of Judy Garland, is no stranger to the unexpected. His most recent project – an ambitious collection of recitations and musical settings of a small, and seemingly somewhat random, selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets – exemplifies his willingness to take risks with his music.

The coloratura soprano Anna Prohaska, whose sumptuous tone features on five of the album’s sixteen tracks, serves as an ideal interpreter of Wainwright’s impressionistic pieces. Ravel’s glittering, modal melodies, Rufus Wainwright along with hints of Massenet, resonate in Sonnet 10 (“For shame deny that TAKE ALL MY LOVES thou bear’st love to any”); Sonnet 43 (“When most I wink, then do mine Nine Shakespeare eyes best see”), fittingly dream­themed as its speaker basks in the time spent sonnets with a love object while sleeping, gets a subdued, and at times haunting, Deutsche Grammophon Britten­like orchestral accompaniment; and Sonnet 20, with the deliciously queered addressee cast as the “master mistress of my passion”, recalls, in its shimmering quietude, Korngold’s “Glück das mir verblieb” from Die tote Stadt.

A melange of genres fills the rest of the album. Florence Welch performs an uncharacteristically mellow, even saccharine, retro­pop version of Sonnet 29 (previously recorded and sung by Wainwright himself). The Peter Gabriel­ esque electro­percussiveness of Sonnet 40 emphasizes the poem’s opening invocation – “Take all my loves” – by creating a cacophony of Wainwrights, with Rufus’s voice layered multiple times against itself. Most singular, though, is an audacious and grand eight­minute Kurt Weill­inspired trio “All dessen müd”, a German translation of Sonnet 66 (“Tired with all these, for restful death I cry”) sung by Christopher Nell in eerie falsetto, the eighty­ three­year­old actor Jürgen Holtz, and Wainwright himself, whose voice is so suited to the style that he should consider joining with Ute Lemper on his next collaboration.

Little positive can be said, however, concerning the use of Shakespeare’s words. The recitations, by actors such as Helena Bonham Carter and, more surprisingly, William Shatner, are largely uninspired (with the surprising

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/shakespeare-on-song/ 1/2 10/15/2016 TLSRufus does Shakespeare – TheTLS exception of Carrie Fisher’s delicately joyous delivery of Sonnet 29) and the musical settings themselves are often at odds with the text. For example, Sonnet 23 (“As an unperfect actor on the stage”), which in part concerns the speaker’s failure using the spoken word to express love, seems an odd choice for a song, least of all a driving, guitar­heavy rock number featuring Wainwright’s sister, Martha, and Fiora Cutler, a Tasmanian musician whose recent collaborations include a dance hit with the DJ/producer Armin van Buuren.

But the flaws and fragility that run throughout the entirety of Take All My Loves are precisely what make it a bold and valuable endeavour from one of the few artists with the courage and talent to convene such an unorthodox, and ultimately very welcome, gathering.

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