Word: tempo
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...material hurts this compilation. Youth, one might think, would work well here, imparting pubescent angst to these most angst-ridden of tunes. Unfortunately, most of the bands featured have too much respect for the songs they cover, playing them in much the same style with only minor changes of tempo or instrumentation. This forces one inevitably to compare the originals--and the comparison often comes up short. The Gadjits' take on the Simple Minds classic "Don't You (Forget About Me)," for example, preserves the source's arrangement down to the deep voices and the "hey hey hey hey" that...
...played more conservatively and reserved than expected, but perhaps more in Beethoven's intended spirit. Conservative in the sense that they played it up-tempo, the Sydney Symphony brought the piece closer to what Beethoven probably had planned and closer in sound to Mozart. Reserved in the sense that the orchestra played No. 2 as a concerto and not as a symphony. De Waart's conducting gestures were never forced, were never angularly abrupt. This added to the fact that the muted vibrations of the orchestra and the sweet mellow tone of the piano actually, at times, cast more silence...
...well apart from the crowd, as does her knack for picking unhackneyed, slightly off-center material (Abbey Lincoln's Angel Face, Jule Styne's You Say You Care). Add in the crystalline piano playing of Frank Kimbrough, and you get an album that clings to the memory. The up-tempo tunes swing hard; the ballads shimmer and shine. Get in on the ground floor: this lady is going...
Things got slightly worse with the great C minor Nocturne, Op. 48, at a tempo that sapped its strength. This is one of the few performances I can think of where the chordal middle section was actually more interesting than its famous neighbors. The left hand would disappear and reemerge at odd, disjunct moments, and there was no sense of heightening at the return of the first theme in its slick new clothes...
...Sean ("Puffy") Combs makes music for Saturday nights, Faith Evans, a rising star on Combs' Bad Boy Records, sings songs for rainy Sunday afternoons. Evans, the widow of slain rapper the Notorious B.I.G., mostly steers clear of hip-hop on this album to focus on slow and mid-tempo R.-and-B. balladry. Some of Evans' sad-eyed love songs float away, like evaporated tears. But at her best, on such songs as No Way and Keep the Faith, she leaves us drained but curiously refreshed, as if we've had a good, well-deserved...