North Of The Border

Marc Chénard, the jazz editor of La Scena Musicale, sent me his review of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, thus acquainting me for the first time with an impressive Canadian magazine. La Scena Musicale publishes a relatively new English edition,The Music Scene, as well as its established French version. The Fall 2005 issue includes not only Chénard’s book review, but also his interesting piece contrasting the careers of Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman.

Rollins, one of the rare surviving masters of the bop and hard-bop eras, is a champion of the great American song book tradition, a veritable walking fakebook of evergreens and jazz standards composed by other greats like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, as well as a few of his own (“Oleo,” “Valse Hot” and the pernnial jazz calypso “St Thomas”). Ornette Coleman, conversely, was thrust on the scene amid controversy, heralded as the instigator of “Free jazz,” a term that until it appearance in the late 1950s meant “music with no cover charge.”

The bulk of the magazine deals with classical music. The cover story is a verbatim interview with the mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli. The Q&A transcription format is lazy journalism, in lieu of writing. For the most part, the mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli gives predictable answers to softball questions, but she does offer an insight into the technical challenge a mezzo faces in roles not written with her kind of voice in mind.

CB: If you look in the original score of Don Giovanni or Nozze di Figaro, Mozart wrote those roles for sopranos; mezzos didn’t exist as a category. For Elvira, you need a flexible voice, but also with a nice, warm color in the middle. Fiordligli has to sing the difficult “Come scoglio”; you need the range up to a high C. But in Act 2, you have this incredible “per pietá,” whilch is really a masterpiece. It is written in the low register, so if you are a lyric soprano, it is good for the first aria but not the second. I sing a role that suits my instrument. In Mozart, it is clear you need once voice for Elvira, and a different one for the Queen of the Night—and I am not planning to sing Queen of the Night! (laughs)

I was taken with the critic Norman Lebrecht’s column about the rise and possible fall of the child soprano Charlotte Church, now nineteen. He compared the pressures on her with those on other child stars, including Judy Garland, Michael Jackson, Yehudi Menuhin, Evgeny Kissin, Mozart, Nadia Comaneci ”and any chess master you care to name.”

As much as the voice, Charlotte’s attraction was her naturalness, her determination to stay close to roots and friends in Cardiff, her sense of mischief. The grim-faced gutter press made a fetish of her frolics, anointing her Rear of the Year at 16, and dogging her dalliances with boys and drink. Charlotte played along with the pack, relishing the sales potential of celebrity, disporting herself on a beach lounger for the benefit of long lenses. She went on-line at the tabloid Sun to discuss ex-boyfriends with its prurient readers. She had the illusion of being in control and, at 19, the world at her feet. Who could begrudge that?

But listen to the single and the smile fades. Taken from her first pop album, Tissues and Issues – her previous CDs were, by some stretch of corporate imagination, designated Classical – “Call My Name” is an unremarkable heavy pounder and the delivery is commendably energetic. The voice, however, has deepened and coarsened, gritting around in a low-alto register and lacking stamina for the longer phrase. Too many fags, too much booze, perhaps. At this rate, there won’t be enough left in the box to sing “Goodnight Irene” when she’s thirty. As for that tremulous vibrato, it has turned into a nasty old wobble much in need of remedial tuition.

Nice uses of alliteration in that first paragraph, hard to do without being a cornball. La Scena Musicale and The Music Scene are well worth a look. You can find them in PDF form by going here.