It came on while I was in the car today, although I'd already set up the timer for it, with some trepidation. OK, she's not Joplin (who else could be?) but she has a total command of the idiom, and there was no hint of the opera singer (a Met Pamina, for heaven's sake) in there at all. My immediate thought was 'not since Berberian has there been such a chameleon singer': I could have done without the intrusive studio introductions, because her own were brilliant and enhanced the proceedings: here's a performer who knows how to handle an audience. A real treat. My only regret was that it made her pulling out of "Our Hunting Fathers" at the Proms even more of a disappointment: she would have grabbed it by the throat and made it magic.

What programme was this? 
Is it still available on Listen Again?

I want to hear it! 

Thank you, Ron Dough!

I realise now this is posted in the 'Afternoon on 3'-section, so I should have known!
I'm listening to it as I speak.

Thanks 

It would have been infinitely worse had she tried to sing the material with the 'trained' voice, smittims: that would have been as eargrinding as most of the big names who have tried 'crossover' albums and fallen with stunning accuracy between both stools. It's not exactly a question of laying aside the training in any case: the breathing and support techniques are just as essential for belting as for Mozart. I suspect what really irked you was that you didn't like the style of the material, and the fact that the performer showed herself absolutely at home in it. If you don't care for the genre, then that's fine, but I can't see that it ever makes any sense to berate somebody for adopting the correct style. If an American rock (or a Northern club) singer should decide to record an album of tenor arias, but reinterpret them in their habitual voices, then they are surely laying themselves wide open to criticism, but there is not one jot less artistry or technique involved in interpreting the genre that Ms Milne performed for that Orkney recital than there is in performing opera if it is to be done properly and establish intimate communication with an audience in the way that was stunningly evident from the broadcast.

Just the last nine minutes, by the way? In which case, most of what you heard was from Jaques Brel filler, which was another genre again...

A performer has just as much right to explore different styles as does a composer. Personal antipathy towards particular genres can never justify adverse criticism of idiomatic performances therein.

And thank you, Smittims, for replying so quickly and honestly. This is exactly the sort of exchange which convinces me that this tends to be a far healthier forum for discussion than The other Place, where by now daggers would doubtless already be drawn and the carrion trolls mustering for their own subsequent rampage.

Best wishes,
Ron

The odd feature of listening to the R3 Lunchtime Concert on Friday (17 Aug) was not its content; The Songs of Janis Joplin; but the rather bizarre time of day for such a broadcast and it may well have been a fist-in-the-face for some listeners.

Once again, my memory started to unfurl as I recalled David Hare's play 'Teeth 'n' Smiles' at the Royal Court Theatre late 1975.   A young Helen Mirren played Maggie, cleverly embodying Joplin characteristics, as the temperamental star of a travelling rock-group, contracted to play at a Jesus College May Ball, Cambridge, 1969 - the same year that I sat in thrall at a Sunday night Frank Zappa gig at the the Palace Theatre, Manchester.  And the Broadway Cast of 'Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris' had played at the Duchess Theatre in London.

The rock group are already 90 mins late at the May Ball and the gig is further delayed by a fault in an unconnected plug to their amplifier and the polemics of the play centre on the British malaise, at the time, ostensibly over lines of demarcation but delving for richer pickings.

Ronald Bryden's review for Plays & Players:

"...The British disease?  Demarcation dispute?  No, this is a skirmish in the latest battle of an older, undeclared war.  When the plug is finally connected, musical aggro sprays itself over the theatre with a roar like machine guns.   'Teeth 'n' Smiles' is about the challenge of pop music in the 60s to the way privilege has regrouped itself in Britain since 1945: to the citadels of meritocracy, the playing fields of competitive education, the boys and girls from good, book-lined homes who climb effortlesssly from grammar school to Oxbridge to the executive jobs advertised, alongside Heal's furniture and the latest biography of Virginia Woolf, in the columns of the Sunday Times...."

Could have been stimulating if R3 had repeated/revived? Hare's play for the Sunday evening drama slot before broadcasting the concert from the St Magnus Festival.   Perhaps only a casual indicator of Janis Joplin's private Furies but Lisa Milne clearly grasped them.   Another case of A Time There Was!

 

I thought 'Cry Baby' was stunning.


Thanks to you and everyone else for the thoughtful responses, MrYorick.