Word: sopranoes
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...bands showed considerable pop potential. Juliana Hatfield played three songs in Billy-Bragg-singer-with-electric-guitar fashion. Her guitar-playing was accomplished and her sugary soprano appealing. But her lyrics failed to achieve the emotional power of the music. "My Sister" and "Ugly" revealed glimmers of a sarcastic edge to her writing, but they still seemed unbelievably shallow. In any case, look for Hatfield on MTV--before midnight--in the near future...
...dresses in Madonna-style bras, strips on stage and sings about justifying her love, but this songbird's debut album will never make MTV. Lesley Garrett, the English National Opera's untraditional lead soprano, presents a sumptuous assortment of operatic arias on DIVA! A SOPRANO AT THE MOVIES. Her finely colored voice with its firm vibrato is not elitist, and she sings this collection of songs that have made their way into films with a passion and abandon that would make Madonna envious. Garrett's plaintive Voi che sapete, from The Marriage of Figaro, and her flirtatious plotting in Quando...
...millennium. Now comes the Irish quartet CLANNAD (whose lead singer, Maire Brennan, is Enya's sister) and an album, Anam, that has all the right career moves: a duet with U2's Bono, a song from the hit movie Patriot Games. The group merits a listen. Brennan's soprano keenings, in English and Gaelic, are variously backed by cool, Sergio Mendes-style harmonies, a bluesy sax, and a guitar's banshee wailing. But in the tune Harry's Game, Clannad goes spare and liturgical, transmuting New Age tonal banality into ageless, ethereal beauty. If you ever ascend to heaven, this...
Imagine a symphony at once brooding and luminous, tragic and triumphant, spun from a single unending melody in three long, seamless slow movements. Here it is, the "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" by HENRYK GORECKI, newly released on Elektra Nonesuch, with David Zinman conducting soprano Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta. The tenebrous string texture is punctuated by Upshaw's ethereally intoning a 15th century Polish lament and, later, a mother's dirge for her murdered son, whose words were inscribed in 1944 on the wall of a Gestapo prison. The result is chilling, moving, unique. With the collapse of communism...
...there anything wrong with this? Not exactly. Battle is our reigning lyric coloratura soprano, and Marsalis, a prodigy who continues to grow as both a classical musician and a jazzman, makes a worthy collaborator. It is hard not to be dazzled and delighted by the pyrotechnics they provide in these predominantly bright, florid selections from Handel, Scarlatti, Bach and others. Yet the album, like its predecessors, seems an event built as much on personality and packaging as on musical impulses. And the limitations of its formula are exposed by the nature of most soprano-trumpet duets: the nonstop bravura finally...