Hard to decide to put this in this thread or in the 'reviews and interview' threads... but here i am.
A good review into tonight's show and other ambitions of Sarah from the Globe and Mail:
quote:
THE WINNIPEG SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA: NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL
Pop singer had doubts about WSO collaboration
Too flattered to say no, Sarah Slean agreed to sing Glenn Buhr's ambitious new work. Then she listened to it...
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
February 2, 2008
What's on your iPod? We used to hear that question a lot, till so many people got iPods that no one really wanted to know what was on them all.
One assumes, however, that most people's portable players contain stuff they like, unless they're too lazy to delete things they're sick of. Sarah Slean is part of a very tiny group of people who willingly stock their iPods with music they don't like but feel compelled to hear.
Well, she did it once, anyway, while preparing for her debut with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra tonight, in the opening concert of the WSO's latest annual new-music festival. Slean had agreed to sing the solo part in Glenn Buhr's Symphony No. 3, a typically (for him) ambitious piece for orchestra, pop soloist and large choir, with texts by James Joyce, Walt Whitman and those medieval pen pals, Abelard and Heloise.
"It was the only thing I would play on my little Nano, on the streetcar or while I was cleaning my house," Slean said, of Buhr's draft recording of her sections of the piece, which come in the second and third movements. "The first time I heard the melody I was supposed to sing, I thought: 'This thing is bony. Isn't it supposed to be Heloise singing to Abelard?' I didn't like it. It went against all of my instincts as a melodic writer. It didn't coalesce as a tune for me for a long time."
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She also had trouble with the harmonies, which ranged rather far from the conventional chords that underpin most pop songs. She was too polite to say so during our phone conversation, but there must have been moments, as she puzzled over Buhr's music, when she wondered whether a single show in ice-cold Winnipeg was really worth all the bother.
"I didn't feel like I had any harmonic footing I could rely on," she said. "I had to recondition my instincts, because I can't get onstage and sing anything unless my instincts are intact, and I know the notes I have to sing and can sing them with conviction."
With only two rehearsals separating her from the big night, she said she had finally absorbed and been won over by Buhr's music, especially in the last movement, when she sings part of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section from Joyce's Finnegans Wake with the choir. When I asked if this was true love or the Stockholm syndrome, she just laughed.
She and Buhr met while both were involved with a CBC Radio project called The Great Canadian Songbook, in which four singers performed four composers' arrangements of classic Canadian songs. Slean and Phil Dwyer were working on Joni Mitchell's catalogue, and Buhr was arranging Gordon Lightfoot songs for Ron Sexsmith. Something about Slean's voice, and the fact that she actually reads music, prompted Buhr to ask her to star in his next big piece.
"He said he thought the festival would be the perfect platform to use a non-classical singer," Slean said. She was too surprised and flattered to say no. In any case, she's always been drawn to large projects and risky ventures. When I first met her, after her first Warner album (the cabaret collection Night Bugs) came out in 1993, she was talking about making a feature film (still possible, she says) and writing a musical. Now she's saying she can think of other things she might do with an orchestra.
"Some day I hope to be involved in a festival of this sort as a composer," she said.
Her latest music, however, is contained on The Baroness, an album coming out in March. The first single, a rather pensive kiss-off number called Get Home, was released this week.
It's a sung monologue for the Other Woman, who is finally telling her married guy to stop lying and go the hell home to his wife. Slean knows the script well, having performed it in real life recently.
"This song is directed at one specific individual," she said. She's had several other beaux who deserve similar treatment, she said, but since some them have already written "entire albums" about her shortcomings, she chose to take the high road, and limit herself to just one chanson à clef.
"I decided to take all the bitterness from a number of experiences and put it into one song and then shut up about it," she said. The rest of the disc is "way more raw and emotionally available" than most of her previous songs, and less dressed up.
By spring, she will no doubt be wondering whether her new stuff is on anyone's iPod.
Sarah Slean performs with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra at the Centennial Concert Hall tonight, in a program that also features a salute to R. Murray Schafer. The WSO's New Music Festival continues through Feb. 8.
