Apparition: Henry Purcell and George Crumb

Review by Patsy Morita Christine Schäfer is an artist with a unique sense of style, which comes through unmistakably on Apparition. First is the cover of Schäfer in a white gown standing with a dinosaur skeleton winding around her like a miniature roller coaster would. Then there's the fact that she and pianist Eric Schneider mix songs by Henry Purcell and George Crumb, two composers you might never expect would have anything in common, but incredibly, the idea works amazingly well. A lot of the success is due to her wonderful voice and the consummate musicianship of them both. Schäfer understands the music both technically and emotionally. There is nary a fault to be found in their performance, and because of that, it's hard not to admire the music and the way it's presented, regardless of how you feel about either composer. She always gives the sense of a real person and that person's feelings in the Purcell, but completely within the dimensions of the music aided by Schneider's sensitivity to making the modern piano also fit within it. The two make the differences between Baroque and Contemporary relate and flow without jarring the listener by placing Crumb's Three Early Songs in various spots between the Purcell songs and putting Crumb's more adventurous cycle Apparition at the end. Apparition is aurally centered, dependent on the sounds that can be made by the voice and a prepared piano more than on the Walt Whitman texts. Hearing it gives more meaning to the brief spoken-word tracks that also are sprinkled throughout the Purcell, which are probably what will strike the average listener as the strangest thing about the program. They are lines from a few of Shakespeare's sonnets, recited -- usually in a whisper -- by a boy and produced with effects reminiscent of what George Martin and the Beatles did on Sgt. Pepper. In many ways, those tracks suggest that the whole program would be perfect for a truly creatively filmed recital. But if you are not the daring musical explorer type, you don't have to listen to the tracks in order and you don't have to listen to everything on the album, as Schäfer says in the notes. Regardless, her singing alone makes it worth giving it consideration.