The album opens with (Quello Che Faro) Sara Per Te (Everything I Do) I Do It For You, an ill-conceived cover version of Bryan Adams' Robin Hood theme that spent a seemingly forever at number one in the UK charts half a lifetime ago. The highlight of this is definitely Adams' guitar playing. Orchestral arrangement syrupy and over lush. Diction poor. Not possible to tell a word of the Italian in which she is singing. Why bother? I can only assume that by taking a middle-of-the-road rock anthem and translating the words into Italian, she will convince Middle England she is an opera singer. I don't see what's wrong with letting rock music be rock. It can be bloody good.
We then move onto Nella Fantasia. The opening phrase is sung like a small child, then the rest is done in that false voice that children - and some adults - adopt, often for comedy effect, to make themselves sound as though they can sing like a proper singer. It's basically the theme music from The Mission film. The orchestra sounds pretty much like it did in the previous track. In fairness Barbie doesn't sound bad on this, except that high note which she takes a big leap up to, and still has to approach from under pitch. I wonder how many takes it took in the studio to get even to that approximation.
Then we have Chanson Boheme (Carmen). It is almost impossible to murder Carmen's music, and it sounds as though the orchestra are much more comfortable playing this, with a crisp introduction, then the Carmen bursts in. I think someone must have suggested she needs to alter her tone a bit more in this, because we get a random selection of tones, from sweet simpering girl, to angry matriarch, to posh Sloane, to something that might be an attempt to do Edith Piaf (French, you see...). Certainly novel interpretations of the fiery promiscuous Carmen.I love the way that she can sound different even in the same phrase or even the same bar. Interesting it is, Callas it isn't. But the orchestral is magnificent, especially the percussion.
Green Green Grass of Home. Now, I love this song...as sung by Tom Jones, who, in my opinion, has one of the great voices, or certainly did at his peak. When he recorded this there was the full richness of his voice, and a sensitive edge of emotion. She sings most of this in her upper register and she is clearly struggling. but I find it difficult to tell what she's singing, even though it's supposedly in English. I think there's one bit where she sings Oak Tree but it sounds more like 'uck tregh'. If you have arrived here after doing a Google for her version of this, you absolutely have to watch - or at least listen to - Tom Jones singing this on You Tube. I have to say, he does look kind of naff with that enormous great big cross round his neck, but boy, can he sing. Jenkins' version isn't fit to be mentioned in the same blogpost.
Be My Love. I have to say, it's not especially a song I like, and there have been so many versions of it. In parts, when it sits comfortably in the middle of the voice, she doesn't sound too bad, but she ruins it again with missed high notes and running out of breath at the end of phrases. I will say that her English pronunciation is marginally better than the recording that I have of Plácido singing it. But only marginally. She can't hit the high notes, so I don't see why she doesn't transpose it down a third. Unless she can't manage the lower notes...
O Mio Babbino Caro, one of those arias which Katherine sings to support her preposterous claim of being an opera singer. Bit of a car crash. There is lots of wobble whenever the note has to be sustained. There's a big leap that occurs three times: on bello, l'amassi and pieta, and she misses it each time, despite the very obvious effort she makes to try and get there. The high note on andrei is genuinely painful, and the entire line Mi struggo e mi tormento! is screeched out with no consideration of how the music is written, nor for the general principles of music generally being supposed to sound musical.
I have loads of records of various sopranos singing it, and this year have heard the fat frumpy ugly Kiri Te Kanawa and the even fatter, frumpier and uglier Anna Netrebko sing it live. Katherine was there when Kiri sang it, and it's utter arrogance for her to assume she can get anywhere near that. If she had heard Anna, she would have been weeping with despair. Or do I mean should? She lacks the necessary humility. It's a soprano aria. Katherine's a mezzo. She can't sing it, should never have tried, and this demonstrates what a fraud she is with her pretensions. If she tried this at an opera house, they'd have to bring back that splendid tradition of throwing rotten fruit. Make mine a pineapple.
She sings the Flower Duet (British Airways ad) with Dame Kiri, but it is engineered so that it is less of a duet and more of Katherine wobbles, with Kiri on backing vocals. We all know that Kiri is well past her best and is pretty wobbly especially compared to how she was twenty years ago, but even so sometimes the sheer natural beauty of her voice shines through and shows Katherine to be an amateur.
Then we get Pachabel's Canon, with the main theme played on an electronic keyboard which sounds like a child's toy. Katherine is going for the pure legato line here but lacks the breath control. She has had it pitched to make the top comfortable but this means as she approaches the lower part of her range, she sounds like she is gobbling the notes. It takes a while to realise she is singing "Alleluia". This track contains an engineering trick, where she is duetting with herself. Hardly novel - Carolyn Sampson did it a year ago and it's probably been done by countless others, too. She tries and fails a trill, more like a wobble through which a bus could be driven. Then the music modulates upwards, out of her range, at which point she's back to the familiar screeching (Jimmy says she tries too hard and will rupture herself). The sad thing is, there are a few notes of value in there, and perhaps if she studied technique some more, there could be a half decent voice throughout the range, perhaps to get her regular comprimario and ensemble work in provincial productions.
Then we have Granada, in English. Not that it is any easier for me to tell what she is singing than were it Spanish. This is a great song for showing off; it's a standard encore for Plácido, I've heard Juan Diego Florez sing it, and Angela Gheorghiu, too, albeit in a rendition that didn't quite work. And again, various versions on record. She murders the song. Absolutely kills it, takes the life out of it, the exotic evocation of swirling Flamenco. She attempts to sing it in a syncopated way with rubato, but fails miserably. And she completely misses the money note at the end to the extent that she does actually sound like a cat in heat. Oh dear...It seems more like a tribute to a chain of Motorway Service Stations than to a beautiful Andalucian town.
I simply don't know Lisa Lan, and assume it is Welsh. I actually have quite a few records in Welsh: Male Voice choirs, Catatonia and Bryn Terfel, so I think I can tell when it's Welsh. Again her poor diction does her no favours, but I can say no more than that. I won't comment further than that. It's not my type of song.
We then have something called "The Prayer". As I don't have the liner notes* I know nothing about it, except that it is an exercise in bad technique. It's mainly in the comfortable middle of her voice, but there are a few relatively high and low notes, where she just murders the transition. For the slightly less high notes, she consistently attacks them from slightly under pitch. And we build up to another dramatic climax of high notes screeched out with desperation of "Get Me Out Of Here" - both from her, and from me, the listener. Her interpretation of this is remarkedly similar to her Chanson boheme. It's a bit bizarre she hasn't considered that there might be different approaches needed for the wild gypsy and for what appears - from the few words I can distinguish - to be a genuinely devout and devotional prayer.
Dear Lord and Father of Mankind is the highlight of the album. It's a fabulous song. She fails to do justice to it though. I think that it is best performed with a thumping beat and an expectation of glory. This interpretation is, I think, meant to be reflective, but tends to the insipid. Again, the diction is appalling, with perhaps one word in three being distinguishable. The usual problems with tone, transitions, swallowed high notes and gobbled lows. My friend, herself a talented mezzo, pointed out that she completely cops out of the "Oh still small voice of calm" at the end, leaving it to the choir. My friend comments "which would have sounded great as a pianissimo beautifully controlled at the top of the register". From this we must infer that this is beyond Katherine's modest abilities. There are singers in churches up and down the land singing it with more conviction every Sunday.
I don't know the penultimate track Il canto, which is more wobble, more shocking transitions between shrill upper register with obvious pitch approximations and budgie-like squeaks, contrasted with growled low notes. It is physically painful to hear.
The Bach-Gounod Ave Maria is taken with lots of swoops, lots of gasps for breath at those oh so long phrases, basically crooned. And she finishes in pure falsetto, utterly devoid of tone or body. She probably sounds best when she is crooning, notwithstanding the breathiness, the pitch approximations, and the characteristic lack of conviction...I mean she obviously doesn't believe in any of the stuff she's singing, so why should we bother? It's churned out mechanically, to extract the maximum amount of money from the Christmas market.
It is interesting to note that overall her voice appears to have a lot more body in it on CD then it does on the various TV appearances she makes. I think this illustrates that audio engineering is more sophisticated, or has more time to devote to it, than TV sound engineering.
I suppose if you have never heard a good singer, and like your music to be full of beautiful tunes with the passion eviscerated and with the orchestral strings over-egged, you might get some enjoyment out of this. But I think it's sad that people are wasting their money on something that is, at best, a mediocrity, and no better than what probably half a million trained singers in the UK could bang out given the facilities. It is a damning indictment of the cynicism of the record company execs that they put this rubbish out, spend heavily on a marketing budget, grease the payola paws of Classic FM, and watch as the gullible public confuses marketing and advertising ubiquity with authoritative critical assessment. Still, she is better than Hayley Westenra.
Well, she's laughing all the way to the bank with an absence of anything that resembles artistic or, it seems, personal integrity. Like she cares about the people she's taking for a ride. It's all money money money for her, with not a concern for the deleterious effect on the music.
* what, you think I bought this...pure pirate
