WELCOME TO THE VOICEhttps://www.sendspace.com/file/g5ozr4
Composers: Steve Nieve, Muriel Teodori
Performers: Sting, Barbara Bonney, Elvis Costello, Robert Wyatt, Brodsky Quartet
An unlikely encounter of a unique project with an all-star cast! Steve Nieve, Elvis Costello's long-time pianist and music director, and Nieve's partner Muriel Teodori, a film/theatre director, began working on Welcome To The Voice ten years ago. She wrote the libretto, he composed the music, and together they developed and shaped the project that is an opera in homage to the human voice. It is a very accessible opera on one CD - one that will interest both the pop and the classical consumer. Welcome To The Voice is a multifaceted opera that welcomes voices from different musical worlds. It lives on the juxtaposition of men who have rough, untrained voices, coming from jazz or rock (Robert Wyatt, Elvis Costello, Sting), with women who have classically trained voices (Barbara Bonney, Amanda Roocroft, Nathalie Manfrino, Sara Fulgoni). The score has been composed for the Brodsky Quartet while Marc Ribot, Ned Rothenberg, and Steve Nieve himself improvise with a jazz feeling. Apart from the music itself, the beauty of this project lies in the profound idealistic - even romantic - themes that transcend all levels of the work. The catchphrase is: 'unlikely encounter'. Seemingly opposing music genres, classes, artists, languages, and codes are unified in the name of love and art. It's no wonder that the project has attracted all the high-profile artists that collaborate in the opera and contribute to the uniqueness of this work.
Composed by longtime Elvis Costello keyboardist Steve Nieve and set to a surreally episodic, multilingual libretto by his life partner, Muriel Teodori, this singspiel/dramatic oratorio describes the obsessive passion of an opera-loving steelworker of Greek extraction (Sting) for a diva (Barbara Bonney), a not-unheard-of situation in either real or reel life. Although Dionysos (the hero) seems to hover on the edge of becoming a textbook psycho-stalker (the cover photo of a hard-hat kissing his saw does little to dispel this impression), all ends well, if unbelievably. Blue-collar boy not only narrowly avoids incarceration (Elvis Costello appears as a police officer) but even gets next to the ermine-collar girl. Scored for string quartet with piano and reed improvisations, the work's avowed raison d'être was to allow voices from various backgrounds, classically trained and otherwise, to encounter one another on a level playing field. This might have been more successful if the singers were better matched in terms of texture and production. As it is, the sopranos soar effortlessly, allowing the music to do the work, while the male pop stars take the opposite approach, working up a sweat at the drop of an emotion. Musically, despite arresting juxtapositions between conventionally melodic power-pop and 20th-century atonality--to say nothing of a blazing concluding "yes" sung by all involved--the composition comes across more as a study in parallels rather than a unifying force. But even so, the point does get across, and so ambitious and heartfelt an adventure is always worth checking out.
