Wannes Cappelle - Kom, benevelt mie! (2020)

Whoever says Wannes Cappelle, says Het Zesde Metaal. With the exception of the Belgian pianist Nicolas Callot, of course. He spontaneously started to think of Franz Schubert when he heard Cappelle a few years ago. “Especially what he does solo on guitar is very much in keeping with what Schubert did in the 19th century”, Callot knows. The Austrian composer rarely played in large halls, “but made music in the living room with friends around it. And that is also in the music. Both in that of Schubert and that of Wannes. ”

The pianist suggested Cappelle to dive into the more than six hundred songs of Schubert together. He thought that was an attractive idea, but it would eventually take until last year for the two to actually work on it. “Flanders Festival Kortrijk then asked me to put together a program”, says the frontman of Het Zesde Metaal. “I was quite bored with that because it would have forced me to admit that I don't know anything about classical music. Until the idea of ​​Nicolas suddenly came to mind and everyone at the festival was overflowing with enthusiasm. ” Everyone, including Cappelle.

The idea was simple: Nicolas Callot would select a few songs from Schubert's repertoire and Wannes Cappelle would translate the lyrics - written by German poets such as Goethe - into West Flemish. “And there is not much I prefer to do than that,” admits the singer-songwriter. “When I'm stuck writing new music, I sometimes just translate existing pop songs that I like. That's my kind of soduko. I really don't like anything more than searching and twisting words in West Flemish to make them fit in a certain meter. ”

What made it a little more difficult this time, however, was that Cappelle could not even find some words from the texts in a German dictionary. "Those things are two hundred years old," laughs the West Flemish. “Not that I wanted to translate them literally. The last thing I wanted is to smash the listener with expensive words. So I have mastered the lyrics, but - I think that is an important nuance - I did not make it my own story. I have remained faithful to the content and the score. Even when there was something in there that was not immediately within my range of voice, I still took up the challenge. ”

Also musically Nicolas Callot wanted to remain faithful to the original works. “Today you often hear Schubert being played on a modern piano,” says the musician, “but I think there is more color and rhetoric in the piano forte from that time. This rhetoric is especially important to me, because both Schubert's and Wannes' work has great narrative power. ”

Callot therefore also believes that Cappelle's interpretation is closer to the original performances than that of classically trained singers. “Yes, they can handle more decibels,” says the pianist, “and that comes in handy today because Schubert is performed in larger venues. But those songs are not written for that. We want to give people on this record the opportunity to crawl back into the intimacy of those songs. As if they are in the room with Wannes and me. ”

"This record" is called Come, mist me! And Nicolas Callot is not exaggerating when he says she sounds like you are in the same room with the two musicians. “When the sound engineer from Het Zesde Metaal listened to the recordings,” says Cappelle amused, “he asked how far I had just stepped from the microphone. In contrast to pop music, where the voice is recorded up close and effects are applied afterwards, with classical the sound is recorded in the room. Without effects. For those who are used to The Sixth Metal, it will sound raw, yes. But I didn't get into this adventure to bring pop and classic together neatly. Of course my background as a singer-songwriter speaks from this album, but I wanted to get to know Schubert's work in the first place. ”

The fact that Cappelle sounds more fragile and vulnerable than ever before is what Nicolas Callot thinks is the beauty of the record. “Apart from the fact that this vulnerability is also in the music, as a listener you get the feeling that you are experiencing something. A feeling that people must have experienced two hundred years ago, when they sat around the piano in a room at Schubert's house. I don't like music for wallpaper, and I think we can safely say that Come on, mist me! is anything but an album that threatens to disappear into the background. ”