Cultural 1
Oct. 12th, 2004 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gervase_fenSomething I couldn't do before I moved was take a train at 5.56 straight from work, in order to go to a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
This was the first time I'd been to the South Bank since the refurbishment of the Royal Festival Hall has begun; light blue hoardings are everywhere, and an implausible reassurance that closing three of the doors of the main entrance still leaves enough exits free in case of fire.
There are now snazzy automatic ticket machines just inside the doors of the QEH complex, very quick and impressive. Waiting to go in I spotted a Famous Person - Bill Oddie, the second Goodie I've spotted 'in the wild' so far since moving.
We were both going to see Beth Nielsen Chapman, an artist I first saw about five years ago in the same venue. She's a singer/songwriter in the style of Carly Simon, Linda Ronstadt or Carole King. She has wonderful, self-deprecating charisma on stage, and an awesome vocal range. Her songs are folk/pop/ballads, sung with grace and, often, spirituality. One particular song inevitably reduces me (and, from what I could see, most of the rest of the audience) to tears - "Sand and Water".
This time there were two more, "Faithful Heart", and her arrangement of the hymn "Ave Verum Corpus", both arranged for guitar, bass, two male and and two female voices. The QEH acoustics, and the awareness of how intently the audience are listening to the performance, and the melodies... it's deeply, intensely moving for me, feelings which I don't usually have at other concerts. And it's not that I don't find the songs of Hem, or Dar Williams, or Joan Baez, wondrous and beautiful when I've seen them sung live - they just don't make me cry for some reason!
I've seen Beth in concert three times now, and always find returning to her albums a bit unsatisfying compared with the real thing - there's an MOR/radio friendly slickness to the some of the songs, which, when stripped away in performance, transforms them. "It All Comes Down to Love", for instance, becomes particularly joyous : "Dancer to the Drum", meditative. In performance, "Sand and Water" now opens with the sound of a conch shell, a soft clarion of reflection before Beth begins the piano intro. Faith Hill's award-winning, million selling version of Beth's song "This Kiss", great as it is (and the reason why Beth can more or less tour the UK without a US major label supporting her) isn't as funny as it is when Beth sings the (pre-Shrek) second verse:
"Cinderella said to Snow White
How does love get so off course?
All I wanted was a white knight
With a good heart, soft touch, fast horse.
Ride me off into the sunset
Baby, I'm forever yours..."
This was the first time I'd been to the South Bank since the refurbishment of the Royal Festival Hall has begun; light blue hoardings are everywhere, and an implausible reassurance that closing three of the doors of the main entrance still leaves enough exits free in case of fire.
There are now snazzy automatic ticket machines just inside the doors of the QEH complex, very quick and impressive. Waiting to go in I spotted a Famous Person - Bill Oddie, the second Goodie I've spotted 'in the wild' so far since moving.
We were both going to see Beth Nielsen Chapman, an artist I first saw about five years ago in the same venue. She's a singer/songwriter in the style of Carly Simon, Linda Ronstadt or Carole King. She has wonderful, self-deprecating charisma on stage, and an awesome vocal range. Her songs are folk/pop/ballads, sung with grace and, often, spirituality. One particular song inevitably reduces me (and, from what I could see, most of the rest of the audience) to tears - "Sand and Water".
This time there were two more, "Faithful Heart", and her arrangement of the hymn "Ave Verum Corpus", both arranged for guitar, bass, two male and and two female voices. The QEH acoustics, and the awareness of how intently the audience are listening to the performance, and the melodies... it's deeply, intensely moving for me, feelings which I don't usually have at other concerts. And it's not that I don't find the songs of Hem, or Dar Williams, or Joan Baez, wondrous and beautiful when I've seen them sung live - they just don't make me cry for some reason!
I've seen Beth in concert three times now, and always find returning to her albums a bit unsatisfying compared with the real thing - there's an MOR/radio friendly slickness to the some of the songs, which, when stripped away in performance, transforms them. "It All Comes Down to Love", for instance, becomes particularly joyous : "Dancer to the Drum", meditative. In performance, "Sand and Water" now opens with the sound of a conch shell, a soft clarion of reflection before Beth begins the piano intro. Faith Hill's award-winning, million selling version of Beth's song "This Kiss", great as it is (and the reason why Beth can more or less tour the UK without a US major label supporting her) isn't as funny as it is when Beth sings the (pre-Shrek) second verse:
"Cinderella said to Snow White
How does love get so off course?
All I wanted was a white knight
With a good heart, soft touch, fast horse.
Ride me off into the sunset
Baby, I'm forever yours..."
