http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... ertainment
(thanks to Nobody for the link; Parky had also posted this in the News section half an hour later than I, so I've deteled the double posting)
CD OF THE WEEK:
Cohen's Glass is half empty
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
December 4, 2007
BOOK OF LONGING
Philip Glass/Leonard Cohen
Orange Mountain Music
Leonard Cohen is still writing poems, but seems to be losing interest in setting them to music. The songs on his latest two albums were both co-written with former backup singer Sharon Robinson and his verses last appeared on disc in a collaboration with Anjani Thomas, another one-time supporting musician who has moved to the foreground of Cohen's personal life.
The poet is mainly a passive partner in Book of Longing, a double-disc collection that I doubt will satisfy anyone's longing for powerful new settings of Cohen's lyrics. The music is by Philip Glass and was first performed last spring at Toronto's Luminato Festival.
This double-disc recording is a fascinating failure that emphasizes everything in the work of these two friends that isn't compatible. Cohen's poetry flows easily between prayer and satire, and between the comic and the tragic. Glass's music is comparatively inert, because his patterns need time to assert themselves. Whatever the speed, the music changes direction only gradually, like an ocean liner, while Cohen's verse rides the breeze like a windsurfer.
The best number by far is A Sip of Wine, in which the nudging cello rhythm and slowly ascendant melody fortifies the wary fusion of love and mortality that lies half-buried in the poem. It's a much better interpretation of the lyrics than the song recorded by Cohen and Robinson in 2001 as Boogie Street. For the rather abject love poem I Want to Love You Now, Glass finds a suitably halting rhythm and a series of line-by-line modulations whose frequent turns to the major mode give the song a visionary tone.
But the music for many other songs feels unengaged with the lyrics. The rocketing flourishes between verses of This Morning I Woke Up Again don't connect with the dark mischief in the verse ("The Lord is such a monkey/ When you've got Him on your back"). There's not much room in Glass's po-faced idiom for humour; only in Mother Mother, a sly burlesque of the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, does he manage to be funny.
The singers include Tara Hugo, an excellent cabaret mezzo, and tenor Will Erat, whose lyric tenor would work better in an operetta. Glass often combines his four voices in close harmony, which drags the piece toward oratorio and makes comprehension more difficult. The long final song, with its laboured chugging instrumentals, is the most ponderous thing I've heard this year.