Something a little bit different - A Yiddish Winterreise by Mark Glanville & Alexander Knapp

Two British musicians have collaborated on an unusual recording for Naxos: A Yiddish Winterreise.  Mark Glanville, a bass-baritone, and Alexander Knapp, and Jewish music scholar, composer and pianist, have assembled a collection of 21 Yiddish songs which they have arranged and organized into a cycle inspired by Schubert's great song cycle, Winterreise, to portray musically "a Holocaust survivor's inner journey told through Yiddish song."  To emphasize the Schubertian inspiration, they have interspersed one of the songs from Schubert's cycle, Der Lindenbaum, which Glanville sings in Yiddish.  And to put a seal on the experience, Glanville ends with an unaccompanied intonation in Yiddish folk style of the Kaddish, the prayer customarily recited as a memorial. 

Unusually for Naxos, a super-budget label, the booklet contains complete English translations for the music (although the Yiddish texts are not reproduced).  Also, an attempt is made to identify authors of the texts, but they have left all the composers anonymous.  Perhaps these are actually all folk songs in a sense, but I rather suspect that composers are known for some of them.  In any event, listening to this is a moving experience.  Glanville has a beautiful, deep voice, deployed with flexibility, and Knapp's accompaniments are fully in the spirit.  The sound, at least as heard initially on headphones, is excellent.