Search results: "Pavarotti"

Pleasing Spectacle

On March 31, 2010

Spectacle: Elvis Costello With… returned to Canadian television in mid-March with a gorgeous music-filled episode that featured Sheryl Crowe, Ron Sexsmith, Jesse Winchester and Neko Case. Sexsmith and Costello performed a particularly affecting version of “Every Day I Write The Book“, with a simple arrangement, two acoustic guitars and voices. Another songwriter-focused episode featuring Richard Thompson, Levon Helm, Nick Lowe, and Alain Toussaint; the season closes with a two-part Bruce Springsteen interview and music session.

That’s a big part of what I so love about Spectacle: its stripping-down of fancy-dancy songs to their bare essentials. Rather like a less-hip cousin to Unplugged (but one with an incredibly good wine cellar), the show features a good slather of intelligent, artist-to-artist chat, discussing woodshed-ish chord-change stuff as well as inspiring books, poems, and places. Simply put, the show is a celebration of musicianship, artistry, and sonic inventiveness, with a good dose of humanity, curiosity, and discovery. These are human beings in Costello’s able hands, not mere superstars. His fascination and respect for his guests shows, and it’s inspiring to watch.

Rounding out the big-name guests on April 3rd will be the repeat showing of the Spectacle taster offered back in December, with Bono and The Edge of U2. I first heard about this episode far before its airing, when the program was taped the week the band were in Toronto last September. My curiosity was stoked, if only because the opportunity to see members of a super-mondo-mega-band in a small venue struck me as a unique opportunity to see taken-for-granted artistry up-close.

Stadium theatrics aside, U2 have always struck me as keenly aware artists. It was good to hear bands like Kraftwerk and Neu! get a mention by Bono as important influences; I sometimes don’t think a band of U2’s stature are given proper credit in terms of their passion for the decidedly non-mainstream sounds that have influenced them. Maybe it’s because those kinds of bands -the stadium-filling ones -aren’t thought of as artists, ergo, they never get asked the kind of artist-focused questions Spectacle specializes in. I’ve always heard a lot of different influences in U2’s work, while marveling at the way such off-the-radar sounds can be re-envisioned and rejigged for mass consumption and appreciation. Is that the mark of true artistry? Or just being clever? I’m still working that one out (though I’m sure longtime producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois would have something to say, being incredible artists in their own right. I’m still waiting for Costello to interview them…).

Whatever the case, friends will probably tell you I have an unusual (bizarre, offbeat -take your pick) appreciation of U2’s creative output. Part of that appreciation includes a song called “Please“, taken from U2’s woefully under-appreciated 1997 album, Pop. I was excited when I heard Costello had opened this particular tune; Mr. Pump-It-Up taking on “Please”? Yes please.

Words, together in some mystical sacrament with music, have always provided a heady, hearty kind of sonic seduction for me, and “Please” is the dark, dangerous lover in the night: imposing, insistent, important, passionate, scary, mysterious, operatic. Oh, and smart. Touching on themes common to U2’s music -God, choice, humanity, a capacity for love, forgiveness, violence and intransigence -the song had, at the time of its release, a particular connection with the Irish peace process. Seeing it live (for the epic PopMart) had precisely the same effect on me as seeing Pavarotti at The Met many years before: it was shattering. “Please” is a very underrated piece of art that is every bit as vital, moving, beautiful, sad and searing as it was when I first heard it. (Also, the video for it is genius. Kudos, Mr. Corbijn.)

When I tuned in to Spectacle last December, I was dismayed to find that Costello’s cover had been cut from the broadcast. I can only speculate the reasons why, but suffice to say it was a huge bummer. But the woe was replaced with a chorus of Hallelujah for the internet: I found another acoustic version of “Please” performed by Elvis Costello in 2000. I can only imagine the audience that September afternoon was treated to something similar.

Years may have etched a few more lines into faces and made hitting those high notes a bit more trying, but time has done nothing to that dark dangerous lover of mine: “Please” is every bit as breathtaking, thrilling, and overwhelming as the first time. Spectacle is so much more than mere spectacle, and sometimes -just sometimes -so are super-mondo-mega-bands.

Spectacle: Elvis Costello With… airs in Canada on CTV and in the U.S. on the Sundance channel. Check local listings for air times.

Saturday with Pav

By Catherine Kustanczy

On April 4, 2009

In music

My childhood was full of music. As well as taking lessons myself, I was surrounded by the holy trinity of Elvis, Abba and opera (with a good measure of Johnny Cash thrown in too). Classical music, and opera, was, and remains a huge passion of my mother’s; she was a childhood singer who, through circumstance, was forced to move away from singing. That “thwarted soprano” ethos informed and drove her passion for opera throughout her life, and deeply influenced not only her choice of husband (a musician, natch) but the way she chose to raise her only child.

My Saturday afternoon were filled with the sounds of the Metropolitan Opera blasting out of every radio in the house. When portable radio players became the rage, I remember walking around the supermarket, thoroughly embarrassed over her swooning along, past aisles of tinned beans and dried pasta, headphones wrapped around her head, the melifluous sounds of opera tinnily emanating from the tiny speakers. There were also innumerable nights spent watching the “Live From The Met” specials, and trying to figure out how to work the then-new VCRs in order to ensure repeated-viewing rhapsody. Every month or so we’d also go to the O’Keefe Centre to watch the latest German/Italian/English spectacle; I barely knew what was going on sometimes (these were the days before surtitles) but I knew the music, having heard it already all those Saturday afternoons.

One of my mother’s operatic dreams was realized when, in the 90s, we traveled to New York City and saw Luciano Pavarotti onstage. He was in L’elisir D’Amore, the opera that happens to be on my radio this afternoon. My memories around this opera are deeply tied to seeing the Pav perform it live many years ago. Though it’s a silly little piece of pseudo-buffa, it has some gorgeous music, and it takes a real presence to bring any kind of levity to the material. Pavarotti brought it (duh); there was a noticeable, and rather incredible hush that descended over the sold-out crowd the minute he stepped onstage. He wasn’t singing at the introduction – just standing there -but he was fully present, in every sense. And his smile lit up the room. I remember turning to my mother, and she had that same huge smile. Then he opened his mouth, and this… sound came out. I’ve never been able to quite describe it, but seeing him live (more than once) remains a treasured, beautiful memory on many levels.

This clip, with Pavarotti singing the gorgeous (and famous) aria from L’elisir with just a piano is incredible for the way he utterly inhabits the music -not just the words, but the music itself, encapsulating all of its passion and wisdom, making a merely silly little love song into a transcendent meditation for the ages. Grazie, Pav.