Word: vocalisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Message songs," says Hancock, "get a little boring. You begin to sound like missionaries. With Sun City, though, you get caught in the rhythms." The rhythms are new, but in fact this vocal conscience comes out of a long tradition. There were activist antecedents in the alternative culture of the '60s, but those were selfabsorbed and, as both Browne and Van Zandt point out, were intermingled with the drug culture. Perhaps inspired by such punk guerrilla bands as Britain's Clash and the Sex Pistols in the late '70s, rock has buried higher consciousness under high conscience...
...section of Manhattan's West Side Highway. The project was to have been built through 169 acres of landfill in the Hudson River, with real estate development and a park on top. It had the support of New York's major politicians, builders and newspapers. But a number of vocal and tenacious critics called the project environmentally unsound and a waste of money. Westway's major roadblock was Federal Judge Thomas Griesa, who twice denied the Army Corps of Engineers a permit to dredge the Hudson. Then the House of Representatives voted this month to kill funding for the project...
...real joy of the evening comes from the two central performances. Peters is cuddly yet tough. She gives vocal color and emotional depth to songs ranging from a succession of one-liners about the social advantages of an English accent to an all-purpose tirade, Take That Look off Your Face, to a delicate ballad, Come Back with the Same Look in Your Eyes. D'Amboise is limited to three facial expressions: wide-eyed wonder, hangdog hurt and a nod of sudden understanding. But he bounces through the ballet routines with every bit of the puppyish appeal that Peters...
While Police fans know that Sting's vocal vocabulary is extensive; ranging from smooth soulful falsettos and calypso lilts to yelps and fierce warning tones; the dominant Sting style on this album is a plaintive ethereal, no doubt sincere, chant-singing. It becomes a trifle tiresome, especially on the preachy first side. Here, he casts himself as a minister/sage, eager to dispense his wisdom. But Sting's poetry is most often second-hand or simplistic...
...Vocal quality was high throughout: Tenor Rene Kollo's sturdy Siegfried, Bass- Baritone Walter Berry's crafty Alberich, the ripe Fricka of Mezzo-Soprano Hanna Schwarz in Das Rheingold. A delightful bonus was the Walkure Fricka and Gotterdammerung Waltraute of Vienna-born Mezzo Helga Dernesch, who some years ago was an important Isolde and Brunnhilde. Combining her still considerable power with a riveting dramatic presence, Dernesch gave a lesson in Wagnerian artistry. Conductor Edo de Waart was too often cautious when he should have been impetuous, but he roused himself in Gotterdammerung to deliver a reading of surge and sweep...