Swiss-German folk-songs
do not figure very strongly in the CD
literature, so many people will be interested
to hear this disc simply from curiosity.
I can vouch for their authenticity as
traditional songs: when I showed the
disc to a Swiss-German friend she recognised
many of them from her childhood. She
couldn’t actually sing many of them
all the way through though.
The nature of this
fractured memory of traditional songs
is something which the arranger, Javier
Hagen (who is also a member of the VOX
Vokalquartett) has tried to bring out
in these arrangements. In the CD booklet
he says ‘these folksongs…form
our homeland in song. But who
can actually remember and sing all the
verses today? This disappearing world
is what these ‘dis’-arrangements try
to recapture, in a playful, abstract
manner, while laying bare their existentiality,
their fragmentariness and their hopes’.
Hagen has arranged
the songs for unaccompanied vocal quartet,
sung by the members of the VOX Vokal
quartet. As might be expected from the
preceding paragraph, the vocal arrangements
are not all completely straightforward.
Stylistically, they seem to inhabit
a region somewhere between English partsong,
the Swingle Singers and Manhattan Transfer.
On first listening,
I found many of the arrangement too
consciously clever; perhaps I would
have felt differently if I had been
familiar with the original songs. Where
the group sing a quite straightforward
arrangement, in such songs as ‘Auf der
Alpen lichten Höhen’ (In
the Airy Alpine Heights) and ‘Die Blümenlein,
sie schlafen’ (The Flowers are asleep)
one can appreciate the group’s lovely
blend and fine vocal quality. The love
song ‘S’isch äbe ne Mönsch
ur Ärde’ (There is only one man
on earth) receives an easy to appreciate
arrangement which is both straightforward
and imaginative.
But in the more complicated,
disjointed arrangements, it took multiple
listenings to appreciate the songs.
In some cases I still think that the
group has tried too hard. Not everyone
will find the farm-yard noises funny
in ‘Es wott es Froueli z’Märit’
(A Woman wants to go to Market), but
the song is described as a coarse and
sarcastic folk-song in which a woman
goes to market whilst her husband neglects
chores at home. In ‘Lüegid vo Bärg
und Tal’ (Look from the Hills and Valleys),
an Alpine farmer describes his impressions
of the mountains; this sounds as if
it ought to be poetic but the group
choose to characterise the farmer using
a tenor solo singing in a funny voice
which is distressingly unfunny. That
one can appreciate the witchy arrangement
of the Hansel and Gretel song, is perhaps
due to our closer knowledge of the story
the song is telling.
This lack of closer
knowledge of the original songs means
that the rhythmically or harmonically
complex treatments of some of them are
difficult to appreciate.
Not all the songs are
perhaps strictly folk-songs; some have
words by poets like Goethe and Adalbert
v. Chamisso. Only one is credited with
an original composer: the melody of
‘Wenn eine tannigi Hose hett’ is by
Otto Muller-Blum. The melody of ‘Guten
Abend, gut’Nacht’ will be familiar to
many as that of Brahms’s Cradle Song
and the Christmas Carol ‘O Tannenbaum’
is included with its original (non-Christmas)
words. The booklet includes complete
original words for the songs, plus English
summaries. Some songs are in German
and others in Swiss-German, so German
speakers may have difficulty.
All in all this is
a disc where the singers display their
not inconsiderable talents in arrangements
which alternately charm and annoy. But
if you are remotely interested in Swiss
German folk-songs, then buy it.
Robert Hugill
VOX Vokalquartett (Claudia Dieterle – Soprano,
Alexandra Forster – Alto, Javier Hagen – Tenor,
Norber Günter – Bass)
