Virtuosic and Adventurous Bass Trombone/ Voice soloist with Trombone Choir

Every once in a while a master composer creates music so radically new that it seemingly falls wholly outside its time and place. Franz Schubert’s 1828 song cycle Winterreise (“Winter’s Journey”), charting an uncanny descent into madness, is such a work. Schubert’s contemporaries didn’t know what to make of it. Its chilly existential numbness is routinely likened in affect to Dostoyevsky. But Winterreise is sui generis.
The timelessness of Winterreise, its limitless expressive parameters, tantalize singers to do something more. It has sometimes been staged. In my experience, adding something more to Winterreise results in something less. I know of only one exception: the Schubert excursions of the bass trombonist David Taylor, himself sui generis.
Taylor plays and sings Die Nebensonnen and Der Leiermann – the final two songs of Schubert’s cycle. He also plays two late Schubert songs setting bleakly surreal poems by Heinrich Heine: Die Stadt and Der Doppelganger.
Der Doppelganger has in fact become a Taylor signature. He first performed it many years ago in Vienna’s Musikverein, as an encore with the Tonkunstler Orchestra. Taylor remembers the initial skepticism of the musicians – and also their subsequent amazement, and that of Vienna’s music critics.
You can hear Taylor tell this story on part two of “Schubert Uncorked (a radio show broadcast of Dec 15, 2017 -WWFM, also online)
.” If you want a mighty dose of Taylor’s Schubert, listen to Die Stadt and Der Doppelganger on part two, beginning at 32:53.
These unique radio programs are recorded in real time by myself, Angel Gil-Ordonez, and Bill McGlaughlin. We listen and react. Bill is in charge. He brings to this assignment a singular combination of gravitas, humor, and informed sincerity. Hearing Taylor’s Schubert for the first time, he registered incredulous admiration; he called Taylor’s Nebensonnen “naked in front of the world.” Angel, re-hearing Schubert/Taylor performances he had conducted half a dozen years ago, called them “much more emotional” than the original versions: “This level of sentiment cannot be achieved with a [singing] voice.” My own reaction, on the air, was to call Taylor’s Doppelganger an inspired “phantasmagoria.” If you think all this is hyperbolic, listen to the broadcast and think again.
Like all PostClassical broadcasts , “Schubert Uncorked” features performances by Gil-Ordonez conducting PostClassical
Taylor also said, of his Doppelganger at 37:45 of part two: “I don’t’ recognize my own playing . . . I never played it like that. That was pretty gargantuan.” And so it is". - Joseph Horowitz, NY Times critic, author, curator of orchestral concerts, and artistic director of Post Classical ensemble.
Yes, Franz Schubert is the inspiration for this cd, but there are other compositions of mine also inspired by the sheer sonic achievements of the trombone, which probably is the main reason this music is put forth. I play and sing words to the songs, as well as the words of Carl Sandburg. The longest composition on the cd is "Too Suite" a work in five movements. Each movement is inspired by the words of Wilhelm Muller (poet of Die Nebensonnen). I am backed up on many of the tracks by the internationally acclaimed Washington Trombone Ensemble conducted by Chris Branagan.