Word: songe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first broad-based success came with his Ghost Opera, written for the Kronos Quartet in 1994 (and newly available on a Nonesuch CD), in which a Bach prelude, a Chinese folk song, the chanting of monks and the words of Shakespeare are woven into a haunting musical tapestry. Since then Tan has completed his first Hollywood assignment (a hard-edged, jazz-tinged score for Denzel Washington's next movie, Fallen, due later this year) and signed an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical. Slated for release in October is Marco Polo: An Opera Within an Opera, a work whose...
DIED. ALBERT SCHOEPPER, 83, conductor who kept the Marine Band--the President's Own--in line and on key; in Alexandria, Va. Colonel Schoepper also played the diplomat at White House concerts: he once continued gamely when Winston Churchill burst into song to accompany the band...
...voice is thin, nasal, with a feminine vibrato and an attack of naked innocence. The song is a noble-masochism ballad called I'll Never Stand in Your Way; the singer is Elvis Presley, right around his 19th birthday. This primitive demo tape is among the treasures in RCA's four-CD, 100-song set Elvis Presley Platinum: A Life in Music. The package, eloquently annotated by Colin Escott and with 77 newly released tracks, means to scrape away the crust of camp idolatry from Presley's image and recast him as a powerful vocalist...
...what's left? A terrific crooner who was closer, in intonation, vocal virtuosity and care for a song's mood, to Bing Crosby than to any top singer of the past 30 years. The under-the-balcony tenorizing of It's Now or Never, the final detonation of pain and taunt in Are You Lonesome Tonight?, the choir-soloist power of the hymn He Touched Me--his voice breaking poignantly at the end of the hymn, as if he had just seen Jesus--these still thrill and haunt. So does his desire to please an audience of kids and grandmas...
Platinum ends with a speech Elvis made in 1971. Quoting Vincent Youmans' 1929 Without a Song, he says, "So I keep singin' the song." The impulse to sing raunchy, corny, beautiful songs trapped Elvis; and in that trap, as this set proves, he sometimes found triumph...