Sadao Bekku Ikuma Dan Shiro Fukai - Nightingale Japanese Art Songs (21 tracks) +Album Reviews +Used CD available for Swap

The travails of life melt away listening to "Nightingale."

03/01/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Yoshikazu Mera, the counter-tenor from Japan, is, perhaps, the finest classical voice I have ever heard. Now, I say "classical voice" as if I knew what I was talking about but here is what I mean: when it comes to a singer, male or female, interpreting the works of Strauss, Handel, Bach, etc., there is no finer counter-tenor in the world than Mera in my humble opinion. His command of his vocal cords is so precise and so hauntingly consistent that I have been spiritually transported to places I have never been before thanks to this man's incredible gift for nailing down notes with precision and grace. I wish the President of the United States would showcase this man's work at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts because then America could become familiar with the world-class counter-tenor we simply know as Yoshikazu Mera. He would, I believe, leave everyone who heard him in person bereft of words and filled, to the brim, with awe. I wish my words were as eloquent as his voice but they are not so you will just have to get a copy of this excellent CD and what I consider to be the companion piece, "Romance." Happy listening!!"

Haunting

01/18/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"When I first heard Mera, I was taken aback by the quality of his voice. A sampler disc arrived with a Gramophone magazine and it took me some time to get around to listening to it, thinking that he was "just another counter-tenor". However, it became apparent very quickly that Yoshikazu Mera is not "just another counter-tenor". His voice floats, it soars. It is haunting, sometimes it seems to come from another world. I have also listened to his Baroque recordings, but this disc (as well as the recent "Romance") sets Mera apart from the other counter-tenors. The material on "Nightingale" is very evocative and Mera paints beautiful pictures with the shadings in his voice."

Very mellow voice

superwt@cam.org | Montreal, http://www.cam.org/~superwt/ | 01/15/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Yoshikazu Mera has a really mellow and well-trained voice, it sounds between alto and mezzo-soprano. His voice is much more mellow than Klaus Nomi's (80's new wave artist), it's obviously worth to own this CD if you're opera fans (especially japanese opera)!"

Excellent, if a bit of an oddity

superwt@cam.org | 05/13/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"These are true 'Art songs', Japanese Lieder, and I'm not sure that many Japanese would be familiar with these songs which are some distance from classical folk songs like Esashi oiwake. Mera's voice of course is exemplary, and credit to BIS for including the full Japanese sung texts (in Japanese script), along with accurate English translations."

Flying on the Viewless Wings of Poesy

Crazy Fox | Chicago, IL USA | 09/01/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I was quite impressed with this CD. I'm not very knowledgeable about classical vocals, but the music on "Nightingale" reminded me somewhat of the songs written by Schubert with lyrics by Goethe I learned about back in Music Appreciation class in college. Most of the selections here are light-hearted and simple with a mild undertone of melancholy, though "The Snow Maiden" is somewhat darker in feel (rather like "The Erl King") and the "Four Songs of Dusk" are positively eerie. As for the vocalist himself, Yoshikazu Mera has an incredible voice, clearly a native endowment of talent that he has fine-tuned with practice and training into a precision instrument. I was struck by the way he not only just sings the words but evokes their mood with his singing, summoning them forth as it were, so that the listener not only hears but really feels the lyrics.

This album was interesting to me in other ways, too, besides its primary appeal as twentieth century classical music. It brought to my attention a whole genre of music in modern Japan, and most of the selections are key pieces in this tradition, giving this CD much value in terms of "music history" more generally and "Japanese cultural history" more specifically. Furthermore, the texts of the lyrics in these pieces are taken from key Japanese poets such as Kitahara Hakushu, Sato Haruo, Kato Shuichi, and Tanikawa Shuntaro, so there is much of interest here for anyone into Japanese literature as well.

Many thanks to my Amazon friend Nurit David for suggesting this fine CD."

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