This album by operatic soprano
Carole Farley is somewhat mistitled; few of the songs are in the first rank of pop standards, and indeed the album's most noteworthy feature is that it includes four world premieres of songs by Kurt Weill, uncovered by
Farley herself. To take the obvious first question first, this collection is worth purchasing for the new Weill songs alone. None is less than intriguing. Weill's control, in the brief The Romance of a Lifetime, of the universe of possibility contained in a flirtatious glance on the street is exquisite. And The River Is So Blue, written for the 1937 film of the same name, is a nifty small-scale example of Weill's attraction to literary texts. The words by Ann Ronell take the slightest of romantic topics -- a pleasant boat ride with a sweetheart on a lagoon -- and just slightly elevate the language beyond moon/June territory: "Oh Love, the river is so blue today -- it calls for us to live." Weill responds with a melody that can only be called ravishingly beautiful.
Farley delivers this unusual item gorgeously. Among her previous outings in a semi-popular vein have been the cabaret songs of
William Bolcom, and she sings this Broadway material similarly, with a slight, rather twittery voice designed for the recital stage rather than for the microphone. She does the melodic pieces justice, articulates the words clearly (for once, when Naxos rather resentfully includes the texts in the booklet, they aren't really needed), and is involved in what she's singing. But in pieces that call for a switch into a gutsier blues or jazz lower register, such as most of the
Gershwin songs and
Harold Arlen's sublimely angry I Had Myself a True Love, she doesn't quite make the transition. Her blues sounds forced, and not for the usual reasons that bedevil operatic artists who take on this repertoire: she is relaxed even in
George Gershwin's most complex rhythmic arabesques around Ira's tortured rhymes (Heine/China, and even sour/Schopenhauer). The sound is another negative, suffering from overall harshness and specifically from a tendency to turn
Farley's S sounds into messy hisses. Any specific complaints the listener may have, however, are outweighed by the contribution this album makes to the American popular song repertoire in the form of the four new Weill songs. They are in that repertoire to stay.