For once I have cheated on my own rule, which is to review only CDs that I have in my possession, not uploads of recordings on YouTube. Not only do you not get booklet and liner notes, which may be an important asset or detriment of the CD, but in my experience sonics on YouTube, while perfectly ok for a casual listening, or often compressed and deteriorated, and the uploads are not always pitch-right.
But there was this improbable version of Honegger’s mighty La Danse des Morts, recorded live in Hamburg in 2010 by artistic forces hitherto unknown to me and released two years later on Troubadisc TRO-CD 01441, that I didn’t even know if it was sung in the original French or in the German translation (turns out it is in French), and for which I did not feel like shelling out the sum demanded for it on the marketplace.
As I found out that someone had uploaded it (and its complement, Frank Martin’s Requiem) on YouTube and the sonics seemed fine, I decided to make an exception and review it.
It may not be very gracious of me to say so since it is on his website that the recording is available, but it turns out that, very much like the versions of Michel Corboz and Edmon Colomer, despite the fine things the performance has to offer sonically and musically, it fails upon an inadequate narrator. German-accented (which, in itself, would pass), mild-mannered, somewhat professoral, Christoph Bantzer sounds more like a German Captain Kangaroo or some Catholic priest genially reciting his homilies at Sunday church, than as a mythical Hebrew prophet. And he has those constant breath intakes that seems located haphazardly and at points that make no sense grammatically and syntactically. I may buy the CD if occasion and cheap price warrants, pel piacer di porle in lista as Don Giovanni once put it, to add it to my collection, and for everything else than the narrator (and especially the bass trombone). With that, I think I’ve heard and reviewed all the Danses des Morts released on CD.
Now I’ll move on to King David and Joan at the Stake.