Josephine Foster Issue #28

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (Locust Music)

By Anne C. Johnson
Published: June 1st, 2006 | 10:18am

Partially funded by a grant from Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Illinois Arts Council, Josephine Foster’s latest offering, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, or Ein Wolf im Schafspeiz, is a collection of reinterpreted German art songs, or lieder. It highlights the lied (the singular of lieder) of Romantic-era composers Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, and Wolf arranged by Foster and sung entirely in German.

The lieder were originally composed for a single voice and piano and seem a natural choice for Foster, who does a magnificent job of customizing these songs with lyrics based upon the works of writers such as Goethe and Eichendorff. Despite a self-deprecating attitude toward her operatic skill (she is an opera school dropout), Foster’s talents as a singer — to the untrained ear, perhaps — are remarkable and her specific otherworldly quality is well showcased in this musical medium. Her spookily apocalyptic version of Schumann’s “Auf einer Burg” is fantastic and she clearly enjoys herself on the album’s final track, Schubert’s “Nahe des Geliebten.”

One unfortunate disclaimer on A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing is Brian Goodman’s guitar work. While serving its purpose in jettisoning the music to the electric present, its introduction on the opener “An Die Musik” is actually jarring and from then on, meddlesome.

The neo-folk movement is nothing if not cerebral and represents an appealing alternative to other camps of independent music that seem determined to kick at the punk-rock corpse. A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing proves that there is still so much more music out there to discover — Schubert alone wrote 610 lied.