Winter 2000
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Barbara Cook: All I Ask
of You
DRG Records (91456)
Released March 23, 1999
Reviewed by Leonel Escota; New York, NY
Musical theater buffs remember Barbara Cook as the apple-cheeked ingenue
in the 1950s from her Broadway leading roles in Candide, She
Loves Me, and her Tony-winning performance as Marian the Librarian
in The Music Man. In 1975, Cook "discovered" the Great
American Songbook when she was preparing for her now-historic concert
at Carnegie Hall. Since then, these great songs have rarely been in better
hands. This disk features recordings, largely taken from her most recent
cabaret act, a tribute to director director Hal Prince. (She'll introduce
her new act, a tribute to choreographer and showman Gower Champion at
New York's Cafe Carlyle this spring.)
Cook has never been better than on this disk, her ninth solo album. She's among that rare subspecies of songbird: a consummate actress with pipes of steel, and a genius of lyric interpretation. Not only does she have the warmest soprano voice, but she sings a lyric so clearly that every word is understood. To say that she just sings is just scratching the surface, though, since she does something more: She makes a song come alive.
My favorite track from the disk is a song I had strongly disliked in the past: the title track. Cook makes the words believable - a Herculean task for a song with lyrics so insipid and generic. All other versions of this song have been sung in either the usual bombastic Broadway-belt style or the soprano operatic mode, but Cook's version is a glorious exercise in subtlety and class, as she concentrates more on how each word is delivered.
Cook's voice has a reassuring quality that is so comforting and calm, and also commanding. In a glorious ten-minute medley, she reprises songs she introduced from the Bock-Harnick musical She Loves Me, and listening to her nearly thirty years later you realize that she still sounds like that 1950s ingenue. More than that, when she sings the last note of these songs, you also hear the aged quality of a voice that has gone through a lot of experience, and that gives these songs a whole new subtext. Through this medley, she becomes a one-woman original cast recording. The story she tells is so vivid as she experiences the longing for a love, the expectations of a first date, the uncertainty of a first meeting; and finally, the realization of the hilarity of it all.
When she sings one of Harold Arlen's most bittersweet ballads, I Wonder What Became of Me, the bitter is bitterest and sweet the sweetest. You can almost see the sky when Cook delivers On a Clear Day You Can See Forever; better yet, you can almost touch it. On upbeat cuts like The Very Next Man and You're a Builder-Upper,' her voice transforms into lilting and effervescent flavors and delivers wonderful brightness - you feel the lift. Only Cook can "paint" bright yellow when she sings about being "corny as Kansas in August." She closes this disk with the song We'll Be Together Again, and you long for the next time you'll be together with her again - soon.
Tracks:
All I Ask of You
New Sun in the Sky / On A Clear Day You Can See Forever
A Wonderful Guy
The Very Next Man
In Buddy's Eyes
I Wonder What Became of Me
You're a Builder-Upper
Glad Rag Doll
He Loves Me
She Loves Me Medley : Dear Friend / Will He Like Me/Tonight at Eight /
Ice Cream
Somewhere
We'll be Together Again
Running Time - 49:39
Album produced by : Hugh Fordin and Wally Harper
Recorded at Edison Studios, New York, 11/20/98 and 12/16/98
Arranged and conducted by Wally Harper
Orchestrations by Peter Matz except for "A Wonderful Guy" by
Robert Russell Bennett and In Buddy's Eyes by Jonathan Tunick.
For more information on Barbara Cook, visit the Barbara
Cook World Wide Web Site
