Roberta Flack in Sydney....
LokoOne
1,823 Posts
Roberta Flack is going to be playing Sydney Opera House, Feb 12-15, with full orchestral symphony There was a cool article in SMH..... "Some interviews become a fascinating obstacle course. Before talking to Roberta Flack, the interviewer is compelled to promise not to ask or mention certain things in both the interview and the subsequent article (an easy demand which has no impact on the end result) and to submit "two or three questions" to her management. That's OK.Then the interview is arranged with Flack in New York through a conference call company, who call and announce that they are about to dial Ms Flack. I wait five minutes, only to be told that Ms Flack is not ready. They will call back in five minutes. They ring and try to connect me again. I now wait seven minutes, thinking to myself: "Given the obstacles, this is not going to be an easy interview."All I want to do is ask Ms Flack about her tour of Australia - next January and February - when she will be performing around the country with a number of different symphony orchestras. In Sydney she will perform at the Opera House with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and she has dates with other orchestras in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.The questions are obvious. How does she prepare to work with a new symphony orchestra? Does she need a lot of rehearsal time? Does she prefer the orchestra format to the intimacy of a small band? And, most interestingly, does she, as Frank Sinatra was wont to do, want to hide the fact that she can't hit those high notes anymore? A symphony orchestra rising at the right moments in a song is a wonderful cover for a voice that can only see high C disappearing over the horizon.Then she's on the phone and she's positively babbling and bubbling. Every question is answered by a long, enthusiastic and circuitous answer. I ask innocently where she is and she explains that she is in the Dakota building in New York. Not "the" Dakota? Yes. John and Yoko lived on the same floor as her. She talks about how she was in New Zealand when Lennon was shot. She sang Imagine that night and "it took all I had to sing the song". She then moves on to sing the praises of Barack Obama as someone who is "bold and bodacious", tells me she was in South Africa when he was elected and then, as an amusing footnote, recounts how there is a town in Japan called Obama. She talks about the world coming together and then delivers a short analysis of the function of We Shall Overcome, briefly name-calls Sarah Palin and adds the enigmatic observation that "things are changing, you know".By now we are 11 minutes into an interview which, in theory, is only supposed to last for 15 minutes and we haven't started talking about Flack and the Sydney Symphony.Finally I get to ask how long she has been working with orchestras. "I have been doing it for quite a while. I stick my chest out when I say that - because I have performed with some of the best all over the world." She lists some of the more important ones. "All these major orchestras have what they call pop orchestras. These are for when people like myself, or Stevie Wonder, or Neil Diamond, or Barbra Streisand, who can go in and do that. I have been doing that for a long, long time and I really love it ??? It sounds so wonderful, especially on songs that are so simple, like First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." The orchestral parts for her songs are sent to the orchestra long before she arrives. When she arrives she wants to "polish things. I am a classically-trained pianist, so I have a very strong desire for things to be as correct as I would demand them to be. Sometimes it takes a while for the conductor to realise that I do know what I am talking about."So, what about the famous Roberta Flack duets? Does she sing Where Is the Love, which she recorded with Donny Hathaway, as a solo? Once again she offers a fulsome answer telling me what a wonderful man Donny was (he died in 1979), explaining that she can sing the song as a solo but she has "a young man singing with me who reminds me a lot of Donny Hathaway", going on to talk about a venue in Omaha where she once performed, offering a detailed analysis of how her new version is different from the old version and explaining how, back in 1973, she recorded the original in "about 25 minutes. I'm not bragging - we loved what we are doing". She even sings a few bars over the phone, doing both the Donny and Roberta parts.Then on comes the conference call girl: "Miss Flack. I am sorry to interrupt but you have three minutes left." She tells me, as though we still have hours to talk, that she has never met Peggy Seeger, the inspiration for Ewan MacColl's The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. She adds that they have talked on the telephone and Seeger has told her that MacColl always believed that Flack's version of his song was the best.And then it's over. I never did get to find out whether she uses an orchestra to mask the ageing process in her voice. Perhaps she just likes singing with orchestras because her voice, one of the wonders of the modern pop scene, sounds so superb when set against a larger and richer musical accompaniment."
Comments
Im thinking its a good valentines day date to take my girl on...... I would love to hear her do Angelitos Negros with a orchestra....