A rare musical talent and a natural beauty with a radiant smile and golden red hair. With the gospel in her soul, pure gold in her voice and soul in her body and yet, she is from Sweden of all places. Born into a musical family, the father a singer at the Royal Opera in Stockholm and the mother a church musician, Ida has been surrounded by music and the love for it her whole life and you can certainly hear it in her performance.
These recordings show Ida Sand's full potential. Meet Me Around Midnight is an album by a singer who pays a lot of attention to the arrangement of each individual song. The arranging focuses on the groove, interpreted differently for each of the 13 songs by Ida and her excellent band. Dark and menacing in her original "Brutal Truth", or with ample blues feeling in the standard "One For My Baby"…
The songs of Alice Tegner and Gustaf Nordqvist have been sung and loved by generations of Swedish people, particularly children. Tegner’s songs for children were published into a series which made its way into many schools and homes across Sweden. A lesser-known genre of the two composers is focused on in this new release: music for mixed choir. Both composers held important choral positions, Tegner composing for and leading a chapel choir, and Nordqvist enjoying a respected position in the capitol.
Ida Haendel’s sinewy and athletic reading of the often under-rated Britten combines toughness with a cumulative dramatic impetus which is hard to resist. Berglund and the Bournemouth players respond with a terse and argumentative vigour, suitably balanced between resignation and defiant rhetoric, especially in the closing Passacaglia. The Walton Concerto, also dating from 1938-9, is played with an apposite blend of inscrutable panache, as in the irrepressibly brilliant central movement, and elsewhere, a sensuous, if occasionally over-indulgent languor. Rare lapses in the finale can be safely overlooked, in a performance of eloquence and undisputed stature.