Requiem for a Pink Moon

Ever since critics began to place "She's Leaving Home" and some of the other more elaborate Beatles songs within the classical tradition of British music, performers have sought ways of exploring connections between contemporary and classical song. The idea seems plausible, yet the execution is devilishly difficult, for simple juxtaposition of rock and Renaissance songs emphasizes their differences, not their similarities. One way around the problem is the insertion of some third element, such as the spy plotline Sting added to his recording of songs by John Dowland. This recording by American-German bass Joel Frederiksen (he actually has a slight German accent here, but not a distracting one) takes a related tack: recording songs by British folk-rocker Nick Drake and putting them together with works by Dowland, Michael Cavendish, and Thomas Campion, he adds arrangements of Requiem chants that, although there are just a few, knit the program together in general mood. The arrangements also help: instead of simply turning Drake into a Renaissance lute song composer, Frederiksen crafts arrangements for viola da gamba, lute, and drum that preserve their original rhythms (although Drake himself often dispensed with the drums). Drake's songs work better for this kind of enterprise than most others of his time (he died a probable suicide in 1974): their prevailing melancholia is of a piece with Dowland's, and the harmonic-modal system of Drake's music, little touched by blues, is close enough to the Renaissance lute song that you can, when you add in Frederiksen's lovely singing and artful arrangements for Ensemble Phoenix Munich, just about forget which composer you're listening to. The engineering from Harmonia Mundi is more than just clear; it helps smooth over the lines that Frederiksen is trying to erase. This offbeat album is one of the most successful experiments of its type.