Patricia O'Callaghan, Gryphon Trio - Broken Hearts and Madmen (2011)

It's not easy in this eclectic age to juxtapose musical items that have never been in proximity before, but Canada's Gryphon Trio and soprano Patricia O'Callaghan manage to do so on this recording, which proclaims itself unlike any previous chamber music album. Even better than that, it's pretty much unlike any previous crossover album, although it has ancestors in the world of classical cabaret music where O'Callaghan has spent some of her time. The novel factor here is the presence of pieces from the nocturnal sides of the repertoires of modern rock composers Nick Drake, Laurie Anderson, Los Lobos, and Elvis Costello, along with Gypsy's Wife by the ubiquitous Leonard Cohen. Most of the rest (there are a couple of French-language songs) consists of Latin American songs, with Astor Piazzolla represented by a piece from the opera María de Buenos Aires. The songs in both languages range from simple traditional material to highly literary conceptions but are linked by the themes indicated by the album's compelling title, Broken Hearts & Madmen. What's striking his how well the combination of rock-era English-language music and Latin song works. Sample track 7, Estoy sentado aquí, a song by the Los Angeles group Los Lobos that is in Spanish but has the structure of a rock ballad; it lies in the middle of what emerges as the continuum represented by the whole, running from folk music to late-night London ruminations. O'Callaghan does extraordinarily well with this highly varied material; she learned Spanish language and music as a high school exchange student in Mexico, and that was a fruitful exchange year indeed. Best of all is her emotionally powerful reading of Costello's "I Want You" at the end, and this is one of several pieces where the trio's arrangements are particularly moody. Some pieces work better than others -- originality of this kind comes with a certain degree of messiness -- and the lack of texts and translations is disappointing in a project of this kind. But this is an obviously original and very exciting recording.