Previn: Honey and Rue; Barber: Knoxville; Gershwin: Porgy And Bess / Battle, Previn, et al
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Composer: Andre PrevinComposer: Samuel Barber
Composer: George Gershwin
Conductor: André Previn
Orchestra: Orchestra of St. Luke's
Performer: Kathleen Battle
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1995-10-17
Music Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Soundtracks:
- Honey And Rue: 1. First I'll Try Love
- Honey And Rue: 2. Whose House Is This?
- Honey And Rue: The Town Is Lit
- Honey And Rue: 4. Do You Know Him?
- Honey And Rue: 5.I Am Not Seaworthy
- Honey And Rue: 6. Take My Mother Home
- Knoxville: Summer Of 1915
- Porgy And Bess: 'I Loves You, Porgy'
- 'Summertime'
Music reviews of Previn: Honey and Rue; Barber: Knoxville; Gershwin: Porgy And Bess / Battle, Previn, et al
Music Review: Kathleen Battle at her very best!
Rating: 5 Stars
I play this CD with great frequency -- it offers a huge range of classical vocal performance.
I listened to Kathleen Battle sing most of these selections LIVE last year in her hometown of Portsmouth, Ohio at Shawnee State University, (I don't know why she comes back here but, thankfully, she does!), and the minute I arrived back at home I got online and ordered this CD. This is an incredible compendium of predominently modern classical vocals with a tinge of 19th-Century Southern Black nostalgic flavour worked in.
At the live performance I attended, Ms. Battle was accompanied by the incredibly talented renowned pianist, Ted Taylor, and I only wish I could obtain a CD in that sort of performance as well; however, the orchestral accompaniment is, of course, nothing short of outstanding -- it's just a little different rendition from what I originally heard.
World-class composer and conductor, Andre Previn, specifically wrote the lion's share of this music for Ms. Battle and he clearly did her right by it. The modern, nearly atonal selections, test Ms. Battle's broad vocal skills... she meets and exceeds the worthy challenge with an apparent ease which is truly astonishing.
Certain cuts are actually chilling -- they will raise the hair on the back of your neck in the proper acoustic environment. Such a composition is "I Am Not Seaworthy". This song is superbly surreal and, like "The Rite of Spring," I have heard nothing like it either before or since it's original publication.
Maybe it took Janis Joplin's raspy bellowing to popularize the song "Summertime" to American Baby Boomers but you never heard a more astonishing performance of that great old Jazz-noir tune than the one on this CD. And if you wish to retain a belief that music cannot break a wine glass, don't turn the volume up too loudly on Ms. Battle's a capella performance of "Do You Know Him?"
Obviously this is some of Kathleen Battle's early work (look at the cover photo!) but it's some of her most spectacular. To me, it's really representative of something that we have little of: American Operetta. Folks, you'll get your money's worth and more on this one -- don't miss it!
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Description of Previn: Honey and Rue; Barber: Knoxville; Gershwin: Porgy And Bess / Battle, Previn, et al
Back at the beginning of the 1990s, with some help from Carnegie Hall, soprano Kathleen Battle commissioned André Previn and Toni Morrison to write a song cycle for her. The result was a set of six songs called Honey and Rue, referring to "the bitter and the sweet" that comes with life and love and is part of the African American experience. One of the songs, the last to be composed, is unaccompanied. The remaining five are scored for chamber orchestra and showcase Previn's chameleon-like abilities as an arranger--here capturing echoes of such European masters as Mahler and Berg, there a hint of Americana in the Copland-Bernstein vein, and elsewhere the engaging verve of jazz and the blues. Previn conducts his score with breezy authority, drawing spirited playing from the Orchestra of Saint Luke's, particularly in the jazzy third song ("The Town Is Lit") and the spiritual-like concluding number ("Take My Mother Home"). Battle sings expressively and with obvious commitment--both here and in the selections by Barber and Gershwin that fill out the disc--though not without her lately characteristic affectations. The recording makes her voice sound oddly reverberant, as though it had been subjected to the kind of processed engineering usually reserved for pop productions. --Ted LibbeyClassical CDs
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