“Recommended.” The
editor of this site doesn’t allow this kind of lazybones review
summary and whilst I don’t always end my reviews with the sort
of alliterative high wire act of linguistic genius that he might
privately like, I’ve not gone down the Recommended tag. Until
now. I’m going to give you my summing up here and now, and it’s
very simple. If you don’t buy a compact disc this year, make
sure it’s this one. It’s “Not Recommended” in capitals ten feet
high.
Just what were they
thinking of before this one hit the processing plant? It’s difficult
to get one’s bearings with performances this awful but Carole
Farley, who presumably sat with headphones on listening to her
singing, assented to release and therefore has to take the flack
from critics who simply don’t understand what she’s doing. Maybe
that’s my limitation - but there it is.
I don’t think going
through every song giving chapter and verse is much help. It
would bore you far sooner than it bored me. This is singing,
to be frank, of breathtaking peculiarity. It’s breathy, wheedly,
swooping, bulging, breaking, adenoidal, pitch-busting, registral-careering
and stylistically all wrong. One moment chesty, the next fluttering
from high notes like a winged partridge, she can’t sustain note
values and allows phrases to disintegrate. There are weird,
hammered-out vocal emphases throughout, causing phrases to lose
shape and meaning. These are contrasted with tremulously floated
lines to maximum disruptive effect. Try Something To Remember
You By as an example of these bizarre practices.
Oh all right, some
textual analysis to support these thoughts. Love in A Mist
is so bulgy and wobbly it’s hard to listen to. Registral breaks
in the voice sabotage The Romance of A Lifetime. Gershwin’s
Poppyland is an early, dull song but that’s not Farley’s
fault, except perhaps for singing it at all. Love is Sweeping
the Country has some verve at least but the voice is hopelessly
unequalized, the style is wrong and that wretched classical
auxiliary vibrato vies with feeble snatching at high notes for
comprehensively depressing this listener. Arlen’s It was
Written in the Stars bumps, grinds and swoops all over the
place. Right as The Rain is simply an embarrassment -vocal
production is so tenuous it’s barely coherent. All too often
Farley sounds like a boy whose voice in the throes of breaking.
Can’t go on. There
are three world-premiere Weill recordings (The Picture on the
Wall, The Romance Of A Lifetime and The River is So Blue)
but they’re not in the safest hands. John Constable accompanies
Farley with professionalism but I can’t say he sounds much inside
the idiom. The lyrics are printed so you can torture yourself
reading them.
Jonathan Woolf
Carole Farley
(soprano) 
