Love Work

Tribute albums we assume times positively that they are almost always meant respect and want to bow to the honorees, and we assume a negative, that they are also almost always motivated commercially and hope on the status and success of the honorees to participate - may very thoroughly fail. Especially when not only an artist honors another, but falls a whole armada of musicians of different musical home on the work of a defenseless Ehrempfängers.

Some clues can be a Poem Leonard Cohen in German rather suspiciously, put at least not too much in expecting the player (on the platter or). Because the musical homeland of the 17 participants are sometimes on different continents. Can this go on?
And then also translations! Can poetry really transferred into another language, then even singable, without mutilating the spirit?
And since the album now also appears two days before the 80th birthday Leonard Cohen, on top of that same day with the new regular work Cohens Popular problem, to top it all is still the sour smell of Abkassierens in the air ...

All doubts, however, already shrinking to a minimum, if you read the preface of the translator in the booklet before hearing the 17 translated Cohen songs. Misha G. Schoenberg met Cohen twenty years ago in Berlin and told him: Hölderlin did for the classics, for Baudelaire, Rilke, and I want to do it for you! Create adequate lyrical transmissions.
Twenty years! So no quick shot to the big birthday. Lyrical transfers! So no phonetically makeshift and radebrechend cope gepfriemelten translations. And Cohen did not give his consent only for projects, but has approved the results enthusiastically.

Only about how Schoenberg writes in the preface and in the comments to the songs on Leonard Cohen and his work, you can feel the love for work on clearly are the doubts and concerns continued. The diversity of the performers a suddenly seems even mandatory, for Alin Coen had in its delicacy the perspective of terrorists in First we take Manhattan hardly can work out as Peter Maffay and his band. And Fehlfarben hardly the melancholy of the letter in song Famous Blue Raincoat so may bring to the blades, as Reinhard Mey it can, etc .. Thus, it seems, the choice of performers, the lyrical transfer each still affirmed. Schoenberg did a great job, where he deliberately used different words, as the stubborn translated obvious he explains it in the accompanying course. Thus goes from Dance Me To The End Of Love literally false Kiss me to the world. The English teacher would have acknowledged it with a 6, Cohen thought it was right and Schoenberg explains why, precisely because it was about the songs in the mood desired by Cohen into German over to lift. The interpretive musician emphasize this lyric transmission just by their diversity.

The whole album can only be described as a labor of love. The quality of the texts and the effort required for proof of this, as well as the audible every detail thoughtful arrangements of pieces by the participating musicians themselves, regardless of whether a subjective now necessarily appeals to every interpretation. A respectful gift to Leonard Cohen's 80th birthday, a truly respectful appreciation.