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Blue: The Complete Cabaret Songs of William Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein (Summit Records, 2003) |
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To purchase this album on Amazon.com or listen to samples, click here. |
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To download this album and samples from the iTunes Music Store, click here. |
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Michelle and David Murray bring their talent for musical collaboration to the international recording scene with their album Blue: The Complete Cabaret Songs of William Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein. William Bolcom, a member of the faculty of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is a 1988 Pulitzer Prize winner. This recording is the FIRST to include all twenty-four of Bolcom’s Cabaret Songs.
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| Blue (Summit Records, 2003) by Michelle and David Murray. |
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The Cabaret Songs are intriguing and accessible late twentieth-century compositions for mezzo-soprano and piano. They blend classical and popular styles and constitute a significant contribution to the American art song genre. This collection contains portraits of fanciful characters such as a self-absorbed girl whose beauty disrupts everything around her, a smarmy poseur intent on seducing every woman he meets, and a cross-dressing opera singer whose untimely death is remembered over cocktails. These pieces also contain vivid depictions of every day life, such as the painful breakup of a marriage and the loving bond between father and child. |
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New York Concert Review (December 29, 2005)
André Gauthier writes:
The program began with William Bolcom’s Cabaret Songs, sung by Michelle Murray (soprano) and David Murray, pianist…. Making the cycle a verifiable “cabaret” feast was the singing of Ms. Murray. Her musicality and intonation were first rate and she puts this music across with an engaging and authentic Broadway style. Mr. Murray made a perfect collaborator. |
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BBC
Music Magazine (November 2003)
Roger Thomas writes:
There are areas of
the repertoire which quite naturally occupy the territory
between classical music and jazz. One such area is cabaret
music. I'd include here the songs of Kurt Weill, as
likely to be sung by a jazz vocalist as a classical
recitalist, and also the remarkable cabaret songs of
William Bolcom, former student of Messiaen and an appreciator
of Gershwin, who sets texts by Arnold Weinstein. Anyone
who enjoys the more demanding kind of jazz singing and/or
appreciates, say, the songs of Samuel Barber will find
Michelle and David Murray's Blue to be a natural extension
of either. |
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Ken
Lafave of the Arizona Republic writes (19 July 2003):
Art song is made of snapshots and crumpled slips of
paper. The grandiose is invited, but must learn to control
its rhetoric in close quarters. Nonsense is admissible;
common sense is not.
Whether
it's Schubert's doomed trout or Poulenc's desire to
smoke cigarettes all day, the subject of song wanders
the edge of literal meaning. No lessons, please. Only
feelings.
We
say this by way of introducing the Arizona Republic-KBAQ
Classical CD of the Week, Blue: The Complete Cabaret
Songs of William Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein. These
are art songs by another name, tiny moments of life
in word and music, for voice and piano. The "cabaret"
moniker owes to the jazzy-pop inflections of Bolcom's
musical language and the sexy topics of Weinstein's
poems.
Valley
soprano Michelle Murray brings heat and soul to these
two dozen minimasterpieces. Singers without appetite
for what they sing are merely specters, but Murray
is alive and full-blooded, ravenous for Bolcom's sliding
melodies and Weinstein's slashing words. When she
sings of Toothbrush Time - that moment, midmorning,
when the lover you brought home the night before is
in the bathroom and you wonder what the heck you were
thinking - she is completely in the scene, modulating
fleetly from shock to mild disgust to interest renewed
almost against her will.
The
pianist David Murray (Michelle's husband) is her nimble,
expressive, hand-in-glove accompanist. The title track
is a whorl of embracing harmonies, the Song of Black
Max (the most performed of the set) is a spiky thriller.
Everywhere in the disc the Murrays, effortlessly musical,
bring to vivid life a world where existence brings
together such disparities as confound the observer:
"Two
pacifist brothers are having a fight,
A
wife's getting loose because her husband is tight."
Curiously,
given that Bolcom is a major composer and Pulitzer
Prize winner, this is the first compact disc to include
all 24 of his cabaret songs. It was worth the wait. |
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| Also, click here for the KBAQ Interview with the Artists. |
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