Globe & Mail: Musical giants give birth to worthy brainchild

[Anne]

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Musical giants give birth to worthy brainchild

ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN

June 2, 2007

TORONTO -- Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen have been going their separate ways for longer than many of their fans have been alive.

I suspect that everyone at the premiere of Book of Longing, their joint project of words and music, entered the theatre with unchecked baggage, packed with real or imagined knowledge of these artists, and of the umpteen uses (film scores, cover albums) to which their works have been put.

We probably all hoped for something grander than they could do alone. What we were presented with was an attractive only child showing traits of the parents that we may have only half-noticed before.

Mr. Cohen has written on many subjects, but his big theme is solitude, and his verse and songs almost always come across as personal statements by a man who is seeking a way out of his isolation.

Mr. Glass's music is also very personal, in that it seldom sounds like anyone else's, but his creative temperament doesn't tend to seek univocal expression. He's primarily a writer of ensembles, whose glittering, close-knit sounds owe their strength to the way they surge and pulse together.

So it wasn't surprising (yet in a way, it was) to hear how often Mr. Glass resorted to a choral texture for his settings of 15 of Mr. Cohen's poems. Instead of one voice, we often heard two, three or four singing together, against a seven-piece ensemble. That was sometimes a beautiful effect, since it let Mr. Glass enrich the harmony and give a certain gravity to the setting, as if Mr. Cohen were party to an oratorio.

But it also tended to make the delivery of the verses square and cumbersome. Four voices can't play with the rhythm the way one can, as mezzo-soprano Tara Hugo showed when she took a solo verse in Mr. Glass's version of A Thousand Kisses Deep.

Mr. Glass's melodic lines mostly moved in step-wise fashion, with few leaps and hardly a note out of the singers' comfortable range. His simple tunes were seldom as memorable as the best of Mr. Cohen's, but they were sophisticated and kind to the verses. It was fun to hear Mr. Cohen's lines accompanied in phrase lengths of seven or 10 beats.

Ms. Hugo seemed the most adept at catching the blood and hunger in Mr. Cohen's verses. She also looked most at home with the studiously casual staging of Susan Marshall, who put the singers in chairs or moved them around the stage when the shadow of oratorio grew darkest.

Soprano Dominique Plaisant skidded close to camp as she delivered an ecstatic account of a woman's nipples rising "like bread." I always thought of Broadway when bass-baritone Daniel Keeling was at the microphone, and Will Erat never persuaded me that a tenor as light as his has a voice in Mr. Cohen's poetry.

One of the most beautiful moments of the show came when Ms. Hugo sang Boogie Street, her vocal line striving up in a way that sounded like hope, against a syncopated string pattern that always ended in a cadence of despair. Each player took a solo, which in the case of cellist Wendy Sutter yanked the show in the direction of J. S. Bach's unaccompanied suites.

Mr. Cohen's speaking voice emerged, for readings of poems so short that one was completely swallowed by applause for the previous number. But his image was constantly in view, in Christine Jones's reproductions of his drawings and self-portraits, arrayed on a rectilinear backdrop like patches of colour in a Mondrian painting.

In the end, Book of Longing was a chance worth taking, and enjoyable to witness. You could hear the two participants greeting each other across their different disciplines, if not always embracing. It was good to hear Mr. Glass accepting Mr. Cohen's invitation to be funny in his music, as Mr. Cohen mocked his own spiritual attainments or riffed on the Buddhist notion of rebirth. His poems had been reborn, in a way that did credit to both fathers.

Book of Longing continues at the Elgin Theatre today and Sunday