Posted in Classical, Lieder on Aug 12th, 2008 1 Comment »
My favourite Mozart song, sung at a concert I went to at Wigmore Hall, London, on 3 October 1995. The singer is Rose Mannion, with Julius Drake at the piano. She sings it beautifully. There’s a period of catarrhal coughing from the audience beforehand, which mercifully shuts up when Rose starts to sing.
‘Smiling, contentment rests upon my soul……you have come bound in sweet chains to my heart’
Posted in Country Music on Aug 11th, 2008 No Comments »
Jo-el Sonnier is a Cajun accordeon player and country singer who made several albums in the eighties. This is his best song. It was written by Tony Romeo. It’s a summer night and, six pack high, he’s waiting for her to come. But Come on Joe, buck up, she’s not worth it.
Joe Brown (and his Bruvvers) did a good version of this song when I saw him in concert at Bournemouth, there on holiday fifteen years ago
Posted in Country Music on Aug 10th, 2008 No Comments »
The O’Kanes (Keiran Kane and Jamie O’Hara) were a country group that made three fine albums in the late 80s and early 90s. They were a close harmony duo, modelled on the Everly Brothers, updated. This song, of male anguish at failure as a father, couldn’t have been written when the Everly Brothers started out, but matches the sentiments of the 1980s when it was released. There’s something genuine and honest about it, a man recognising his failure as a father and wanting to do something about it.
Posted in Folk Music on Aug 8th, 2008 No Comments »
Leezie Lindsay, part traditional Scottish song, part Robert Burns, was put to new use by Eddi Reader in her 2007 album ‘Peacetime’. For her version she kept the Burns chorus and added new verses written by herself and Boo Hewerdine. What was originally a song about Leezie Lindsay being wooed by the Laird MacDonald now becomes a song of longing – to be out of the city and in the Highlands with her. The city is in the verse – its noise, cars, and lights that extinguish the stars, where you “can’t hear the birds when they’re singing” and the “river is losing its voice”. In the last verse with Leezie, in the Highlands where she is, is love and a truer home.
A touching song from a lovely album.
Posted in Folk Music on Aug 5th, 2008 3 Comments »
Wisewebwoman’s recent moving post about emigration and feelings of rejection has prompted thoughts of exile. So I’m posting this heartbreaking song, written from letters a father sent to his son emigrated to America and whom he never saw again.
Posted in Classical, Lieder on Aug 5th, 2008 No Comments »
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was one of the most intelligent and thoughtful sopranos of the twentieth century. He voice wasn’t large but it had a mature sweetness and a melting quality that made it uniquely adapted to the music of the romantic composers, notably Richard Strauss. She was concerned with vocal quality but even more so about words, and the drama in the song. She was one of the great lieder singers. There were times, perhaps, later on, when her art occasionally tipped over into artfulness, a little self-regarding. But here she is at her finest. Singing Schumann’s Der Nussbaum at a concert in Carnegie Hall in November 1956. Particularly impressive is how, in the last verse, her voice withdraws as she becomes the young woman sinking back under the nut tree into her dream of him. The pianist is George Reeves.
Posted in Jazz on Aug 3rd, 2008 No Comments »
My admiration for Charlie Parker has always been grudging. It comes as no surprise to me that he was a egomaniac sponger on everyone he came into contact with – you can almost hear it in his music. That acid tone, the flippancy of his phrasing – that irritating Woody The Woodpecker phrase – and his clever-dick quotations – the clarinet break from High Society being the one he seems to throw in most often when he runs out of ideas. And there are rarely any moments of silence in his solos. Everything is a waterfall of quavers, semiquavers and demisemiquavers, endless and unstoppable, bludgeoning you into admiration, an exercise in domination, putting us all in our place. A harangue at the top of his voice. I sometimes catch myself listening to him with my mouth open.
Lester Young plays no more notes than he needs. As if no-one else was there. We’re listening in on a soliloquy. His silences are eloquent, as if he is searching for his note, like the right word, to express just what he feels. His improvisations are parallel melodies, conjured in an ethereal world of the sublime.
Here is one of his greatest solos. ‘Embraceable You’ from a live performance in 1949. Roy Eldridge opens with a lovely, and uncharacteristically subdued, chorus. Young follows him. After Young, Tommy Turk on trombone. Then Parker, seemingly calmed by his surroundings, and the tune, into thinking a bit more carefully what he wants to say. At times he still plays twenty notes where one would do, but there’s less of the incontinent rush than is normal. A fine final solo from Flip Phillips on tenor.
Posted in Classical on Aug 1st, 2008 No Comments »
I first saw, and heard, Angela Hewitt play in the mid 1990s, at London’s Wigmore Hall. I went, but not out of great enthusiasm. I had barely heard of her, and the programme was Bach keyboard works, about which I was lukewarm. But I was acquainted with the promoter (a former work colleague) and tickets sales were slow, so out of loyalty I trudged along.
It was a revelation. She played Bach with a graceful fluidity and precision that completely won me over – to her and to Bach’s keyboard music.
The Hall was only half full. But this had the singular effect of heightening the sense of privilege I felt at being at that Wigmore Hall concert. Tickets for her concerts now are like gold dust.
Sadly I have no recording of that concert, only memories. But here she is playing at the London proms last year. It’s an encore: ‘Orpheus’ Lament and the Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ from Gluck’s ‘Orpheus and Euridice.
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