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“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

 

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