Editor's Desk

Tori Amos at (Le) Poisson Rouge Photo by Ebru Yildiz for NPR

Tori Amos — pop siren and dazzling keyboard technician — gave a special, one-night-only concert on Friday at New York’s (Le) Poisson Rouge. Over the past few years, classical musicians in search of the below-Fourteenth Street crowd have gravitated to this cabaret venue on Bleecker Street, so it makes sense that Amos, who has partnered with the Deutsche Grammophon label, would embrace the quirky venue for a chamber concert with string octet. Tickets were free and available exclusively through a lottery on LPR’s website, though I noted at least one lucky, ticket-less fan who waited out the line, which wrapped around the block, and gained standing-room admission.

Amos was promoting her latest album Gold Dust, a collection of greatest hits in newly orchestrated renditions, marking the twentieth anniversary of her breakout success with Little Earthquakes. For fans who grouse that the updating on Gold Dust is too subtle, that the new versions sound suspiciously similar to the old versions, this concert was a revelation. 

In the live show at (Le) Poisson Rouge, Amos’s interaction with the string players felt substantial and collaborative. The crescendos in “Cloud On My Tongue” were excitingly synchronized, and she sprinkled extra measures of music throughout the song, exposing the seams between verse/chorus, giving the piece a sense of expansiveness and showing off the instrumentalists. Even a fan-favorite like “Hey Jupiter” got the revisionist treatment: Amos deconstructed the song and put it back together, turning a teary, haunting ballad into an up-tempo cabaret number, with plucked strings and percussive keyboard effects. It sounded like a cross between Gotye and Kurt Weill. Going solo for some selections, Amos proved that she could turn a beautiful composition that had seemed too earthbound on record into a buoyant success — most notably “Taxi Ride,” her tribute to makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin, who died in 2002. 

Of course, Amos’s prowess in a live setting is well documented. Rolling Stone acknowledged her undeniable onstage allure in 2003, placing her at No. 5 in its list of the “20 Greatest Live Bands” and branding her “a one-woman wrecking crew.” With the industry-wide decline of CD sales, Amos is one artist who has benefited from the increased importance of concerts and tours in bolstering a recording artist’s profile. Luckily, NPR Music sponsored and broadcast the LPR concert, and it is now available in streaming fashion in their online archives.  

For a filmmaker who has repeatedly taken as his subject the jumbled, chaotic world of artists, Woody Allen has amazingly little of any freshness or depth to say about the creative life. I started to get nervous back in 1978, when he unveiled Interiors, his drama about a New York family of people obsessed with achieving creative perfection and always feeling that they fall short of it. The dialogue seemed so stilted and self-conscious that at times I thought Allen was offering up a parody of Bergmanesque angst. Since then, with the exception of 1986's Hannah and Her Sisters, which revealed some rather funny and touching truths about another New York family of artists, he's been spinning his wheels. The dramatic situations he sets up have a peculiarly artificial scent about them, like one of those model apartments where you can smell the newness of the carpeting and furniture. He deals in types and clichéd situations, and no matter how cleverly certain scenes are brought off, everything feels too worked out and predictable. (This was true to an extent even in Hannah and Her Sisters; the only scene that genuinely surprised me was the one in which Maureen O'Sullivan poured out her drunken resentment of her husband, played by Lloyd Nolan.) 

I was going to skip Allen's new film, To Rome with Love. I didn't, for the simple reason that I was drawn by the opera elements in the plot. Allen plays Jerry, an avant-garde stage director who has been reviled for tampering with the classics. (One of his famous productions is a Rigoletto with everyone dressed as white mice — a detail that, like practically everything else in the film, isn't nearly as funny as it's meant to be). Jerry and his wife, Phyllis (Judy Davis), travel to Rome to meet the Italian man their daughter plans to marry. The boy's father is an undertaker named Giancarlo (played by tenor Fabio Armiliato). When Giancarlo steps into the shower and begins singing, Jerry, standing outside in the hallway, hears evidence of a remarkable voice, and Jerry hectors him to turn pro. The trouble is that Giancarlo can't sing well except when he's in the shower: when Jerry organizes an audition for him in front of a group of top-flight opera managers, Giancarlo blows it completely. Jerry comes up with a solution: recitals and stage productions will be engineered so that he can sing while showering. The gag is mildly amusing the first time but less so in its many repetitions. And really, the whole conceit of the talented amateur being terrified to perform in the professional arena is old-hat. (Remember Marilyn Horne guesting on TV's The Odd Couple, as the opera singer who couldn't open her mouth unless her pal Oscar, played by Jack Klugman, was in the room?) Allen skips lightly over the opera material as if pleased just to show us another facet of his cultural fluency; he never really gets into it at all — never does anything truly inventive with it. 

The main raisons d'être for To Rome with Love are Darius Khondji's lovely, terra-cotta-tinged scenes of Rome, the funny individual moments contributed by Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni and Judy Davis and the film's biggest surprise — the relaxed, appealing screen presence of Fabio Armiliato.  

BRIAN KELLOW

Reports of the death of the music video, much like that of print media, are greatly exaggerated. Lady Gaga proved as much earlier this month at the MTV Video Music Awards, where she nabbed eight "moonmen" (MTV’s equivalent to the Oscar statuette) in recognition of her revitalization of the genre.

Classical-music marketers never met a pop trend they didn't like, so Deutsche Grammophon gives us "El Vito," a music video of mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča singing Obradors' song in support of her latest album, Habanera.

The video seems singularly designed to convince us that Garanča is a sexy minx in her role as a hard, bewitching, capricious Gypsy — but is that enough of a concept to sustain its three-and-a-half minutes? Music videos were created to visualize pop music, and over the past thirty years, the style of their presentation has evolved in tandem with the style of that particular genre. Does Garanča's video embrace the idea of a cinematography of classical music? No. Could one be created? Maybe.  

OUSSAMA ZAHR

George and Ira Gershwin's melodies pervade popular culture with the same frequency as Carmen or Debussy's "Clair de Lune." Two weeks ago, Brian Wilson contributed to the fold of Gershwin interpretations, releasing his newest album "Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin." The album, issued on Disney Pearl Series, is his second after the release of the much-anticipated "Smile" in 2005.

As you might expect, the former Beach Boy presents these standards, musical theater numbers and arias in cooing, three and four-part harmonies awash in reverb. Wilson plays "'S Wonderful" as a bossa nova, à la João Gilberto; he redefines "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'" from Porgy and Bess as a instrumental jig for harmonica; and he adds both string and saxophone accompaniment to "Summertime" , singing with what you might call Southern California sprezzatura.

If it's too weird for you, there are plenty of other renditions to fall back on. Take the following, for instance: Leontyne Price singing "Summertime" for Jimmy Carter in 1978.  

– TRISTAN KRAFT

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I feel ever so slightly betrayed by Renée Fleming. After the 2005 release of her jazz CD Haunted Heart, which I liked none too much, she really went out of her way to regain my trust. She turned in one splendid performance after another (from Violetta and Desdemona to Tatiana and Rusalka) and recorded a handful of intriguing CD projects. And then — with a regularity that rivals the phases of the moon — she dropped another crossover album.

That is not to say that Dark Hope, her new indie-rock effort, is nearly so heinous as Haunted Heart, which left me demanding concrete, recorded evidence that Fleming actually spent any of her college days touring as a jazz singer.

At the end of the day, Dark Hope is simply impressive in its genre impersonation (more the music than the video for the first single; see below). You can catch Joanne Sydney Lessner’s delicious yet fair review of the album in the October issue of OPERA NEWS.  

— Oussama Zahr