Skip to main content

Want

It was Radio DJ Marc Riley's advocacy of Rufus Wainwright's Want albums that eventually led to my acquiring them ca. 2018 or '19. I have the 2005 2-CD set including both Want One and Want Two: I gather Wainwright had meant these songs to be released as a single set all along, and it was only his record company's reluctance that led to them first being issued as his third and fourth solo LPs respectively.

To my mind Disc 1, i.e. Want One, is the stronger of the two halves, with a whole slew of knockout tracks on it, out of which my favourites are probably 'I Don't Know What It Is', 'Movies of Myself', '14th Street' and 'Beautiful Child'. Several of the songs give the impression of having been recorded in a big room crowded with musicians and singers: they're generously-proportioned, both musically and emotionally.

Disc 2/Want Two has its highlights too though: with its singles being the stand-outs to my ears: 'The One You Love', 'The Art Teacher' & 'Gay Messiah'. The long closing track ('Old Whore's Diet') on the other hand, is my least favourite track out of them all. Tacked on to the end of Disc 2 are a pair of bonus tracks, including Wainwright's version of Leonard Cohen's 'Chelsea Hotel No. 2' (Cohen also gets a mention in the lyrics of 'Want'). The songs & performances are top-notch and producer Marius de Vries did a superb job twiddling the knobs.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...
Post a Comment
Read more