January 10, 2005
MUSIC REVIEW | AUDRA MCDONALD
Dressing Up Pop Songs in Refinement
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
The selection of Audra McDonald, that one-woman crossroads of vocal genres, to open the season of Lincoln Center's American Songbook series is an encouraging sign that the program, which has languished in the shadow of Jazz at Lincoln Center, really means business. Her concerts on Friday and Saturday (the gala opening scheduled for Thursday was canceled because of illness) brought the newly expanded series to the better-equipped and more glamorous Rose Hall at Columbus Circle, where Jazz at Lincoln Center has landed.
Ms. McDonald is one of a handful of singers with the conceptual flair and vocal flexibility to upend conventional wisdom about the boundaries between classical and popular song. Having established herself as the foremost interpreter of semiclassical theater songs by Youngish Turks who blur the lines between the opera house, Off Broadway and pop records, she embodies the American Songbook aesthetic, which swirls the waters from assorted musical tributaries into an informal art song. That informality is the key. Too academic an approach would risk turning pop into a stuffy museum display.
Having presented the songs of composers like Adam Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael John LaChiusa as semiclassical works that stretch traditional art song by the likes of Ned Rorem toward pop accessibility, Ms. McDonald turned around on Friday and blended songs by the same composers into a pop concert that showcased material by Randy Newman, Rufus Wainwright, Stevie Wonder, John Mayer, Laura Nyro, Joe Raposo and Nellie McKay.
Her musical director, Ted Sperling, and principal arranger, Bruce Coughlin, recast the pop songs in refined chamber-pop arrangements for a 10-member ensemble. That refinement isn't for everybody. Pop purists would chafe at the subdued elegance of the musical wrapping paper. But for those with willing ears, Ms. McDonald's concert was a transforming experience.
Everything she performed was guided by her powerful dramatic instinct. Exploiting the lower end of her voice, she turned the Elvis Costello-Burt Bacharach song, "God Give Me Strength" (from the movie "Grace of My Heart") into a wrenching moan of despair. Mr. Guettel's ballad, "Life Is but a Dream," which the singer Billy Porter has stamped as an operatic pop-soul cry, she re-invented as gentler, sweeter embrace of life.
Mr. Wonder's "Happier Than the Morning Sun" sparkled with pure joy. And Nyro's sprawling, tricky "Tom Cat Goodbye" (from the album "New York Tendaberry"), she elevated into a dramatic pop-blues tour de force.
For all the emotional darkness Ms. McDonald can conjure, that turbulence coincides with an stubborn innocence that keeps certain attitudes out of reach. She found the humor in Mr. Newman's "Political Science," but not the corrosive cynicism. And Mr. Newman's interior monologue "I Think It's Going to Rain Today," which is really a suppressed tantrum of misanthropy, was diminished by her stentorian approach.
But these are small quibbles about a program that set a dauntingly high standard for what lies ahead. American Songbook seems ready to burst into full flower.
Audra McDonald performs "God Give Me Strength"
Moderator: mark