The first in a series on online fortnightly concerts with music from the Musical Theatre repertoire, with each concert showcasing and celebrating the music of one (or in this case husband and wife team) British composer. All the songs have been recorded by working industry professionals, many with West End credits and awards to their names, whilst in isolation in their own homes. The sound quality on some, therefore is not optimal, but everyone is pulling together to use whatever technology is available and to try and keep their creative muscles flexed, as well as others entertained.
Before watching this concert I had to use Mr Google, as despite being a huge Musical Theatre fan, I had not heard of Daniel and Laura Curtis as composers before, and wasn't aware of any of their output. It seems that although they have been very active within the song-writing industry for some time, had their music performed at The Royal Albert Hall and sung by some of the biggest stars, they have collaborated on various projects, written songs for concert performances, charities, and other worthy causes, but haven't actually written a musical...... yet!
Listening to their songs for the first time, their music is passionate, emotive, sweeping, lyrical, tuneful, in fact has all the ingredients necessary for Musical Theatre... I put in my scribblings whilst watching "Celine Dion meets Frank Wildhorn!" The couple certainly are talented writers and their tunes are soaring and elegaic, and ought to be better known than frankly they are. However, after listening to ten of their songs on this recording, I was struck by how similar in fact, all ten were. I was longing for a funky, fast, comedy song. All ten showcased were love ballads, power ballads, or just basically ballads. I'd had loved them to have dropped a different tempo or style in there too, or given us a comedy song. The nearest we got to a change of pace was actually my favourite song of the evening, which had a bit of a Rock 'Meatloaf' vibe to it, 'Tell Me What Makes A Man'. sung this evening by Luke McCall.
Other favourites from this selection were Nadim Naaman's rendition of 'What Happened To Yesterday', Maria Coyne singing, 'Stand', Oliver Savile singing 'No Disguise', and Brian Cheney's version of 'Every Song'.
The concert was hosted (again from his own home via Zoom) by The Barn Theatre's own Jamie Chapman Dixon, and the between-song chit chat was kept to a minimum, and made for some interesting insights into the background of the songs.
Reviewer - Chris Benchley
on - 17/5/20
No comments:
Post a Comment