Profile reviews
5Listening to Channa Malkin's clear and flowing voice is a true pleasure, but her new album dedicated to her son is much more than an esthetic experience. In Russian songs, the Dutch soprano explores both various aspects of motherhood as well as her Eastern-European Jewish roots. The texts are about overwhelming motherly love, but also about displacement, child abandonment and suicide.
The Dutch soprano Channa Malkin explores aspects of motherhood and maternal love in This is not a lullaby, an album of songs by Mieczysław Weinberg, Sir John Tavener and her father Josef Malkin ... Malkin’s soprano is pure and smooth but full of feeling. The song grows compellingly from quiet reflectiveness to fervent melodising, soaring to the stratosphere and then plunging low, neither registral extreme troubling Malkin who sings with impressive focus. The vocal line and the cello’s double-stopped slitherings blend beautifully in ‘Pushkin and Lermontov’ and again Malkin’s registral range and sheer power and presence are stunning. This is a disc which not only intrigues and satisfies, but one which promises much more to come. Malkin will undoubtedly create new projects which bring interesting repertoire, of personal significance and meaning, together in interesting and inspiring ways.
