The hits just keep on coming
… and the hope gets darker and darker as La Scoopenda performs Leonard Cohen‘s “Hallelujah.”
Also on the program: a live(ish) version of “Endlessly” that includes (Herr Gott in Himmel!) a little headbanging during the bridge.
Actually, she sounds like Cher in ‘Hopelessly’, though a bit more inflected. And a bit less plastic surgery – as yet.
Okay, these Renee crossovers are always an invitation for abuse. And yes, Virginia she has been an embarassment in the past. Now in Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” more hymn-like simplicity and less artfulness would bring out the beauty of the words and music.
However, “Endlessly” is a really good song, with a superb arrangement and Renee sounds good singing in a low key and putting over the text very naturally. (Reminds me of how Kiri Te Kanawa discussed how in working with Nelson Riddle on “Blue Skies” when her voice got too operatic, Riddle would lower the key) I think everything works here. I don’t know what demographic I am in but I would buy the album because if the rest of the CD is as good as that track, it is worth owning. (I have pure trailer-trash bloodlines on my mother’s side of the family).
Flame away.
As someone who heard most of Renee Fleming’s MET performances this season – and, yes – I mean almost all..!don’t ask, Mary (not by choice – never by choice) and as someone who has been unhappy with most of what she’s done, I’m actually quite happy with her take on “Hallelujah”. Frankly, it’s the most idiomatic, emotionally invested and accurate singing she has done all year. Is that really saying a lot? No! Has hearing what she did to poor Rossini on a weekly basis effected my opinion by making anything sound better by comparison ..Maybe….she seems relaxed here…involved even…and that is normally never the case with her..
No, with the release of this CD, I predict the end of opera AND the end of pop music as we know it! There will be nothing but destruction and death in its path.
I already have my emergency supplies ready (crank radio, crank flashlight, cans of Spam) and preparing for musical Armageddon ahead.
I didn’t realize taht they made special gear for cranks. I’m glad to hear that you have gotten yours.
Don’t worry chaka, store up on all the ‘vocal goodies’ from the past 50/60 years and then say f…k to all this pseudo -shit, where the only sound they want to hear is the cash registers. Imagine if Susan Boyle and Renee’ were rivals for the same Grammy category !!!!!!!
Unless we store and listen to the artists that truly dedicated themselves to their Art, we help to commit them to oblivion, in the face of this garbage onslaught. Resist! Make the past ‘live’!
Well, I did it. I listened to the two Fleming clips presented here. While it is not the kind of music that I like, it sounds to me to be as good as any of the “big” names of popdom and far, far better than most opera singers. Kiri sounded terrible as a pop singer. She just couldn’t get it, any more than she couldn’t get over the idea that the audience would be throwing panties on stage for a group that was to appear on the same concert bill. Renee gets it, gang.
Why is there a great tendency on this site to bash any opera star who gets a deal of limelight? Like an interpretation or not, that’s ok; feel free to tell me why.
As far as popular music goes, in 2010, I prefer not to hear female (or male) singers doing what is the current idiom. Jo Stafford, Margaret Whiting and even Joni James are all gone. Georgia Gibbs and Peggy Lee barely memories. The thing is, what they were singing were not pop standards at the time, they were just a ditty that would sell a few records and make a buck or two for their propducers and the performers. The further thing is, some of the songs became standards and can be heard in almost every cabaret performance that you will ever attend.
If Renee is singing songs that will sell a few records, (and singing them as well as you can, given the idiom) what’s the fuss? You don’t like that style (and I don’t,) don’t buy the record. I’m surely not going to buy this pop CD but I’d buy her Armida DVD. If I could afford the trip into NYC and the Met seats and the wear and tear on my old glass bowl, I’d go to see her in it.
I also can’t imagine how Marliss Peterson went from crummy in Hamlet to wonderful in Lulu in about three months. It boils down to just this: I can’t really take anything that gets said here too seriously. I really can’t.
As a parting gift, for now, just for Wladek, Philly’s Concert Opera Theater will be doing “Die Lustigen Nibelungen” in June. I’m sure he will just love to hear that Oscar Straus is back on the boards with this one.
“As far as popular music goes, in 2010, I prefer not to hear female (or male) singers doing what is the current idiom. Jo Stafford, Margaret Whiting and even Joni James are all gone. Georgia Gibbs and Peggy Lee barely memories. The thing is, what they were singing were not pop standards at the time, they were just a ditty that would sell a few records and make a buck or two for their propducers and the performers”
IN an odd way, that is true, and yet totally ridiculous at the same time. While there were a host of novelty songs recorded in the 30s (Mairsy Doats?), 40s, and 50s (How Much Is That Doggy In The Window), it does a disservice to issue such a braod generalization. While everyone hopes to write what will become a standard, no one knows what will acutally become one until after the fact. But a lot of songs were great even then. I defy anyone to tell me what songs from the last 10 years will hold up as well as the songs recorded by Margeret Whiting, Rosemary Clooney, Helen O’Connell, Doris Day/Les Brown (Sentimental Journey!), Dick Haymes, Early Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and on and on and on. And while those singers may be memories for you, my Sweet, they aren’t mere memories for a lot of other people. ANd the argument that it wasn’t the pop music of their day is spurious, at best. Your Hit Parade ran for over 20 years and featured at one time or another Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Dinah Shore, and Dick Haymes, to name a few. And for a brief period, it was broadcast on both NBC and CBS. And need I mention the songwriters? Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and on and on and on.
In 50 years, will we still be singing “Ooops, I Did It Again”? Um…
Who knew these kinescopes still existed?
httpv://www.archive.org/details/Your_Hit_Parade_Complete_Episode
http://www.archive.org/details/Your_Hit_Parade_Complete_Episode
Sanford: I really think that we are on the same track. How about, instead of “Ooops, I did it again,” we go back to 1945 and Vaughn Monroe’s (old muscle throat): “There I said it Again?” Or better yet, what I guess would be Margaret Whiting’s biggest hit:
If you are going to mention Ms. Whiting, you ought to mention her dad, Richard Whiting, another of the very good songwriters. I would not mention any of them without including Harry Warren, and neither would Michael Feinstein.
My point, which I feel you missed, to some degree, was simply that singing popular music, then and now, was more about a commercial enterprise than creating great art. The fact that some of it turned out to be so memorable was a nice bonus. (Not memorable in the sense of “Come ona my house,” or “If I knew you were coming, I’d have baked a cake,” both Rosemary Cloony hits I’d just have soon missed but in the sense of: damn that’s a good under-three-minute piece. (About the most that you could squeeze on one side of a 78.)
Johnny Mercer could also sing songs that other’s wrote. “Ak-cen-tu-ate the Positive” was a big hit for him but he didn’t write either the words or music for it. He could turn out hit lyrics with three different composers, compose a song or two of his own and then make a hit record, all in the same year. What a guy.
If Renee wants to cash in on the popular medium, for whatever it’s worth in commercial terms, fine with me. If she finds a public for her singing in that style, it will be no different than Domingo’s “Perhaps Love.” I know, I know, I’ve opened another door to endless wailing about his lack of… well, I don’t know, appropriate decorum for an opera star and a yen to do one of everything all at once.
While this is not half as good a Pinza’s version, here is another big name doing something “not quite operatic.”
Cheers!
I think Johnny Mercer would be surprised to hear he didn’t write Accentuate The Positive, which he wrote with Harold Arlen. And I did mention Harry Warren.
I love KD Lang’s Hallelujah, but I prefer Jason Castro’s more quiet version. And he’s cute, too.
Apocrypha: back when I was 13, I committed myself to a hospital (it was bbetter than getting beaten up at school). I took all of my mother’s 78s with me (The Andrews Sisters, Harry James, Glenn Miller, et al) and one day while cleaning our room, I put the bed down on top of them. That was in 1973; my mother still reminds me about it every once in a while.
He swings, he misses. Sorry Sanford, I was wrong twice and you were right. You did mention Harry Warren and I missed it in the string of names. My apologies.
My other miss was that “Ac-cen-tchu-ate the positive” was, as you report, by Mercer and Arlen. However, my point was that Mercer was probably the most universally talented guy on the scene, and it is demonstrated by a different song, also with hyphens, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” which was used in “Disney’s Song of the South.” It was written by Allie Wrubel, the lyrics by Ray Gilbert and published in 1946. Mercer had it number eight on the charts as a singer. I remember (although given my last essay at top of my head reminiscening, perhaps I’d better think it over again,) Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten, the child stars of the movie, with whom I identified, being of like age.
The real point is that I think we share a universal love for music. I hope to hear you in concert someday.
No, not ‘Oops I Did It Again’. But then we’re not singing ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ any more either. Anyone can knock down a strawman. There’s plenty of music being produced today that will be around in 50 years time.
“Bell Bottom Blues” is that like “Bell Bottom Trousers”?
“I also can’t imagine how Marliss Peterson went from crummy in Hamlet to wonderful in Lulu in about three months.”
Easy – they’re very different roles. I think Ophelie is to a large degree about Stimm. There are also more exposed high notes. If your top is receding, you’ll hear it more in a role like that than Lulu. Also, Petersen sang her first Ophelie just days after finishing the grueling new Reimann opera in Vienna. Lulu also has a plusher orchestra which helps hide certain sins. Some roles just sit better in a voice than others, and after several runs of Lulu, this one works great for Petersen in a way Ophelie, which she sang only once before, doesn’t.
That said, I agree you can’t take everyone here seriously. Hang around long enough, and you’ll figure out whom to pay attention to and whom to ignore.
Thanks for your thoughts. I agree that not every singer can do every role but, in the case of Ms. Peterson, whom I saw via HD, I thought she deserved better than she got for the role. I was very happy to see her as a replacement for Dessay, although I would have been happy to see Dessay do the role too.
I’ve been around long enough to see many come and go, and even the ones I liked least, I at least appreciated that they had gotten to the point where they where doing major roles and that it was a memorable experience of a type of music that I really love.
Yes, I’ve seen people who really ought to have quit a few years earlier but, they’re still trying and, given my own senior status, it’s nice to feel that they still can muster the energy to give it a shot.
She’s picking the wrong material. She should do the old Meat Loaf/Jim Steinman things, like ‘Total Eclipse’. Or she should go through Madame Dion’s catalogue and try to out-Celine Celine.
OK, Hallelujah was dreadful, like Mariah Carey after a night of drinking. Endlessly was not as dreadful, maybe a like a tame Whitney Houston, though I suspect that Endlessly was lip synced, while Hallelujah was live.
But, all likes and dislikes aside, I have a very technical question, I hope that there are voice teachers and/or voice doctors in the cher public. Why is her voice in Halleluja (and in the interview before the song) so raspy and horse? Was she sick? And if she was not, because we could hear the raspiness in her recent Armida, is there something hormonal (read menopause) that affects the “sweetness” and maleability of ones voice? Her voice breaks quite a lot in Hallelujah, why? Yes, I know that she sings even opera with that kind of jazzistic breaks and scoops, but this sounds like much more than “artistic” sense, it sounds out of control. Can somebody explain this, please? Is there some kind of physiological reason for this?
I may be wrong, but I think it’s an effect. I think it’s supposed to convey seriousness and emotion. I think it might be applied to the surface, much like Photoshop can apply textures to photos.
This is what I want to think too, for her own sake, and for the sake of every female singer out there. However, in my ears this effect sounds out of control.
You know, I wonder if this is what’s happening with Debbie Voigt too. It might not only be that she lost muscular support to sustain her voice, but she is at the age of menopause, plus, as we learn in science class, adipose tissue has important endocrine functions too, and she lost a significant amount of that tissue.
She sounds that way is both an affect and thanks to choice of key. As to the latter, Fleming’s admitted as much in interviews. I sing both classical and jazz and know that’s the trick. To avoid both damage from taking the chest too high and sounding too “classical” in the passaggio, you drop the key. When I sing jazz, I rarely sing higher than an octave above middle C. That said, her affectations are, to my ear, unnecessary.
Truth is, at least as far as the Cohen Hallelujah, it’s already been sung far more beautifully:
yup…as much as i’m not wild fer the Song..KD does it ..VERY VERY NICELY…!!!
I just hate the song, just as I do Amazing Grace. The in-built rancid oozing- cheese sanctimony of it all ….Yikes! And also probably because every two bit amateur hack who calls themselves a singer, attempts them. You hear the first strains…and you say ‘not again!!!’ Judged against the feelings simply conveyed in some composer’s Mass or Requiem etc……we are boring out our ears with such monotonous drivel. Open the dust-bin. Ready-aim -fire!
And might I add this song, the first pop sung ever with overdubbing. All of those voices are Patti…in 1947.
Beat Les Paul and Mary Ford by about a year.
I just don’t like her singing this kind of stuff because KD Land sings it more naturally, just as I don’t like her singing Schubert or Faure’ songs, with all the scooping she likes to do. That being said, I enjoy her Strauss opera roles or Rachmaninoff songs where the Romantische “scoopage” fits fine. I also remember her singing the Countess years ago – truly stunning. Disclaimer: It’s been a while since I’ve heard her sing live. I did notice her raspy speaking voice and popping some notes, most likely from vocal fatigue, hormonal stirrings and swelling of the cords. Maybe she’s bored? Maybe this kind of rep is what brings her joy? All power to her, but, it just does nothing for me, unlike her Kander’s Letter from General Balou sung at Horne’s Carnegie Hall birthday extravaganza years ago – now that was truly amazing.
I like the “bored” theory
because that is something that she controls, as opposed to things that control her (and her voice), though I never liked and still don’t like her singing and her voice, in any genre.
How many people realize that Marilyn Horne, when young – was once known as a ‘Pirate Queen’. In her auto-biography she describes it vividly. Making ‘cheap vocal cover versions’ of various Top Hit Parade singers’ songs. Those 78′s and 45′s were marketed to people that could not afford the price of the genuine record. If I am correct she mimicked people like Kay Starr’ then famous for songs like ‘The Wheel of Fortune’. Today, they would be curious collectors’ pieces.