The Ideal Copy

This latest release from the multi-award-winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake features a literary and musical form which inspired the greatest voices of German Romanticism. The foremost poets and composers of the age saw the ballad as a direct link to the folk-minstrels of the past. Frequently ghoulish and sensational in character, ballads satisfied the popular taste for the Gothic.

According to Jack White, Get Behind Me Satan deals with "characters and the ideal of truth," but in truth, the album is just as much about what people expect from the White Stripes and what they themselves want to deliver. Advance publicity for the album stated that it was written on piano, marimba, and acoustic guitar, suggesting that it was going to be a quiet retreat to the band's little room after the big sound, and bigger success, of Elephant. Then "Blue Orchid," Get Behind Me Satan's lead single, arrived. A devilish slice of disco-metal with heavily processed, nearly robotic riffs, the song was thrilling, but also oddly perfunctory; it felt almost like a caricature of their stripped-down but hard-hitting rock.

In the summer of 1998, the Human League set out on tour with the reunited Culture Club, both bands hoping to capitalize on the new wave nostalgia that was slowly sweeping the country. The tour naturally provided an ideal opportunity for a new hits collection, The Very Best Of. Essentially, it's a slightly reworked version of Greatest Hits, sharing all the obvious tracks ("Don't You Want Me," "Love Action (I Believe in Love)," "Mirror Man," "Fascination (Keep Feeling)," "Human," "Being Boiled," "The Lebanon") and subsituting earlier cuts like "The Sound of the Crowd" and "Open Your Heart" for middle-of-the-road '90s singles "Tell Me When," "Stay With Me Tonight," "Heart Like a Wheel," and "One Man in My Heart."

With their faultless intonation, transparency of line, and ideal balance between emotional intensity and cool intellectuality, the Tallis Scholars are unrivalled in this repertoire. Peter Phillips highlights the individuality of the different voice-parts - making their individuality comprehensible - yet forms a homogeneous overall sound. By comparing the early Missa Ad fugam and the later Missa Sine Nomine Josquin's stylistic development becomes clear: the thick sound-world of the early work, with its melismatic long-drawn-out lines, yields to a much tauter style, full of rhythmic contrasts without forfeiting any complexity.

These performances are every bit as searching and exhilarating as the Lindsay’s previous Haydn recordings for ASV. Theirs is chamber-music-making of unusual recreative flair, untouched by the faintest hint of routine. Many quartets still seem to treat Haydn as an agreeable aperitif to the ostensibly meatier fare later in the programme. But both live and on disc the Lindsay bring to the composer the same dedication and interpretative insight that mark their playing of Beethoven or late Schubert.