On ClassicsToday: Angel Heart; CD from Hell!

Leave No Cliché Behind: Luna Pearl Woolf’s Be Still My Bleeding Angel Heart

Review by: Jens F. Laurson

Artistic Quality: ?

Sound Quality: ?

The beautifully and lavishly packaged Angel Heart is marketed by Pentatone as a “music storybook”. At its center is a tale by Cornelia Funke, the author best known for her Inkheart Trilogy of teen-novels, which is read by Jeremy Irons. The music is by Luna Pearl Woolf: a real person and, conspicuously, the wife of Pentatone artist and executive cellist on this disc, Matt Haimovitz. Generously judged, the assembled artists produce a polished little Gesamtkunstwerk in a post-Goth fairytale look, replete with postcards and lavish booklet. It’s a straightforward little story about a girl with a heartache who enjoys a visitation by an angel with whom she takes a short trip, meeting spiritual friends along the way who sing a few numbers, both original and traditional, and eventually mend her heart by way of musical quilt before 70 minutes are over. The feel-good factor is high... continue reading