Sarah Vaughan Centennial – Jazz at Lincoln Center Click here to join Click here to hear Misty When I make my list for Desert Island Discs, which I revise at least once a week in the hope that one day I'll be invited onto the long-running BBC radio programme, there’s one entry that never changes. It’s Sarah Vaughan’s Misty. Here’s a 1964 live video of it from Sweden. Irresistible. The power, range, and flexibility of her voice made Sarah Vaughan one of the greatest singers in jazz. With her rich, controlled tone and vibrato, she could create astounding performances on jazz standards, often adding bop-oriented phrasing. Along with Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, Vaughan popularized the art of jazz singing, influenced the generations of vocalists who have followed her including, of course, DeeDee Bridgewater. This week, at Jazz at Lincoln Center, there’s a two-night celebration of Sassy, the irreplaceable Sarah Vaughan, who died in 1990. That’s all the justification we need to revisit her musicianship and ebullient personality. You have to join jazzlive.com ($9.99 a month) to watch the live show with DeeDee Bridgewater online but you can join for one month if you just want to watch this show and, if you loved Sassy, it’ll be worth it. La Rondine – The Metropolitan Opera Click here for quartet Click here for duet I had never seen Puccini’s La Rondine until this week when I managed to snag a good seat at The Met, no inconsiderable feat if you don’t want to take out a second mortgage to do it. I accomplished it by running into an acquaintance from London who happened to have an extra ticket. This new production, in Nicolas Joël’s opulent 1920s staging, transports audiences from the heart of Parisian nightlife to a dreamy vision of the French Riviera. It stars soprano Angel Blue as the French courtesan Magda, opposite the young tenor Jonathan Tetelman who is making his Met debut as Ruggero, the idealistic young man who loves her. They truly make wonderful music together and though they look somewhat ill-assorted. She is a big singer with a huge voice and he seems somewhat skinny and weedy beside her until, that is, he opens his mouth and there’s nothing skinny or weedy about that voice. Soprano Emily Pogorelc and tenor Bekhzod Davronov complete the principal cast as Lisette and Prunier. To give you a taste of what I enjoyed this week, the Met has released this excerpt of the delicious Act 11 quartet, “Bevo al tuo fresco sorriso”, (“Drink to your beautiful smile”), efficiently and elegantly conducted by Speranza Scappucci. And, from an early dress rehearsal, here too is part of Magda and Ruggero’s Act II duet “Perche mai cercate di saper” (“Why are you trying to know?”) Ionesco – Rhinoceros Click here to watch Eugene Ionesco was a Romanian-French playwright who was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century. Ionesco instigated a revolution in ideas and techniques of drama, beginning with his "anti play", The Bald Soprano, which contributed to the beginnings of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd. This includes a number of plays that, following the ideas of the philosopher Albert Camus, explore concepts of absurdism and surrealism. He died 30 years ago this week. Rhinoceros (first produced in 1959) is perhaps the most accessible of his plays but that’s not saying much when you realise that it’s about Bérenger, a semi-autobiographical figure who appears in several of the plays, always expressing his wonderment and anguish at the strangeness of reality. He is comically naïve, engaging the audience's sympathy. In Rhinocéros (this production is from Peepolykus in 2002) he watches his friends turning into rhinoceroses one by one until he alone stands unchanged against this mass movement. It is in this play that Ionesco most forcefully expresses his horror of conformism, inspired by the rise of the Fascists in Romania in the 1930s. This reference may be lost on us today but there’s no missing the humour and humanity in the writing. World Voice Day Click here for website According to the Medici website, April 16 is World Voice Day, “a moment to recognize the wonder of the human voice in all its capacities.” Who knew? Anyway, the website has a fine collection of videos about the great opera singers of the world. There’s a sopranos version, Sublime Sopranos, which includes Maria Callas, Barbara Hannigan, Kiri Te Kanawa, Renée Fleming, Kathleen Battle, Sonya Yoncheva, Natalie Dessay, Danielle de Niese, Pretty Yende, Nadine Sierra, Asmik Grigorian, Camilla Nylund, Sabine Devieilhe and more. There’s also Tremendous Tenors (Jonas Kaufmann, José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Fritz Wunderlich, Rolando Villazón, Juan Diego Flórez, Andrea Bocelli, etc), Magnificent Mezzos (Cecilia Bartoli, Joyce DiDonato, Marianna Crebassa, Teresa Berganza, Christa Ludwig, Janet Baker, and more). And Medici hasn’t forgotten the Best Baritones and Basses (like Bryn Terfel, Thomas Hampson, Matthias Goerne, Tito Gobbi and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau). These are available from the Medici website as individual programmes but I thought you would like to know that they are available all in one place if you suddenly get a yen to hear, for example, Fritz Wunderlich. No scrabbling around on the internet, looking for him. Queen of the Night – ornithologically speaking Click here to watch One of the most difficult and effective soprano arias in the entire operatic canon is "Queen of the Night" from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Many careers have faltered in the attempt to reach its heights. Here are excerpts of two versions. Do watch both. The first version is sung by Diana Damrau at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The second, well, judge for yourself. New York Pocket Reviews The Outsiders – Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre Two gangs, teenage boys with too much testosterone and not enough sense. Two groups of kids with nothing better to do than hate each other. Sound familiar? Of course, it’s West Side Story. Actually, no, it’s not. It’s The Outsiders, a new musical with enough parallels to that great show that its antecedents are not in question. Scene by scene, The Outsiders pays homage to the Jets and the Sharks except that here they’re the Greasers and the Socs (short for socialites) and their rumbles are right in line with what Jerome Robbins might have choreographed if he were still with us and fifty years younger. A stunning cast of unknown young performers – three-fers, in the jargon, meaning that they can all sing, dance and act – act out their grievances, which mainly amount to the distance between the haves and have-nots in song, dance, and angst. The songs by Jamestown Revival spell out their attempts to navigate their world but in fact the choreography from brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman is what gives shape to the story. The Outsiders is an adaptation of a wildly successful young adult novel by a teenager, S.E. Hinton, which was made into a film by Frances Ford Coppola. Nearly everyone in the theatre had either read the book or seen the movie. Except me. How closely The Outsiders:The Musical cleaves to the original I can’t tell but I was glad to have come to this terrific evening in the theatre with no preconceptions. Water For Elephants - Imperial Theatre
This is part musical, part circus, and wholly fabulous. What an exciting evening in the theatre this is. A ‘book-end’ show, which starts with an old man remembering his days in a travelling circus, turns into the story of circus people, animals, and a time only dimly remembered when the circus came to every town. How this particular circus prospered and finally died is the story he tells. Leading the cast is Gregg Edelman, a Broadway musicals stalwart, and Broadway newcomer Grant Gustin as his younger self. The prize performer is an adorable gigantic puppet elephant called Rosie and her trainer and biggest fan, Marlena, who happens to be married to the circus’s violent owner, Augie. What makes Water For Elephants different from the run of the mill musical is the integration of the story and the circus without short-changing either. It’s hard to tell where the feats of acrobats, jugglers, animal trainers and aerialists merge with the actors, singers and dancers. This show has good songs which drive the plot forward by Pigpen Theatre company, sung with charm by an excellent mixed cast of circus performers and actors and fast-moving choreography by Jesse Robb and Shana Carroll. But the greatest plaudits go to the director, Jessica Stone, who pulls the whole complicated agglomeration of moving parts together into a highly entertaining show which works for the many children in the audience as well as the thinking, hungry adults who love a good musical.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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