Rufus Wainwright - Rufus Does Judy At Carnegie Hall [2 CD]
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Free Music Notes for Rufus Does Judy At Carnegie Hall [2 CD]
Free Music Review: Odd self-indulgent curiousity
Hit: 2 Stars
A huge disappointment. I'd really been looking forward to borrowing of a copy of this thing so I could finally hear what when on. I pop it in, and off it goes. Soon I'm thinking... wow his vocal-range isn't very great... gee his voice really isn't suited to this material AT ALL... yikes he's missing as many notes as he hits! Maybe you had to be there?? Rufus is amazing with certain types of material, but this sure didn't work for me. I could say it was a missed opportunity, but I'm not sure that an opportunity ever really existed to start with. So glad I didn't actually pay for a copy, I'd be really annoyed!Free Music Review: Wonderful To Hear Those Arrangements Again BUT...
Hit: 2 Stars
I adore Rufus. I adore his original material as well as many of the covers he has done. This however, is simply an embarrassment. Who are you kidding, honey, trying to redo Judy's ultimate musical triumph? Those arrangements and orchestration are terrific...but pleeeeeeeeeze, Rufus, you do NOT have the chops to sell it. No way. No how. That being said, when you stop playing drag queen and simply sing some of the ballads, it's lovely...and Rufus-like. Forget doing the bombastic numbers that require a Linda Eder et al to do effectively. Much of this CD is just awful....cringe-provokingly awful.Free Music Review: Artist Indulges Himself, but not Me
Hit: 2 Stars
I'm actually somewhat of a fan of Rufus' work. However, this is one he should have left alone. His voice and stage presence are clearly not meant for classic showtune-ish songs about adult themes which require range, vibrato, nuance, and gosh, you pick a few. His interpretation is flat and lacking in, well, interpretation.
He's handsome and talented, no doubt. He should stick to what he does best.
The second star is for the orchestra, though they should have had more sense as well.
Free Music Review: Nice Idea...Gone Terribly Awry
Hit: 1 Stars
Wainwright is a singularly gifted alternative pop/rock artist and singer/songwriter--let's make no mistake about that.
His affection for Judy Garland is noble and he deserves three cheers for wanting to create (or, in this case, "re-create") something of significance to underscore her influence upon his musical development, life, worldview, what-have-you.
The idea for this completely modern and outside-the-mainstream artist to recreate the legendary Judy Garland Carnegie Hall concert in 1961 was interesting and, at the outset, so unexpected as to be kind of cool. The added bonus of on-stage participation by his equally talented mother (McGarrigle), sister (Martha) and even Lorna Luft (Garland's daughter) was all in excellent decorum.
Had Wainwright himself settled for the *tasteful* success of that initial, unique, one-night tribute at Carnegie Hall, the entire concept of this project would have gone down as an uqualified coup.
But, it's become painfully obvious that good taste degenerated into waste, once the idea itself became sensationalized and blown out of proportion into a "milk-it-for-all-it's-worth" commercial "gimmick."
The problem is not so much that Wainwright sings most of these songs poorly (and he *does* sing them quite poorly), or that that he is strikingly ill-suited to the genre--he hopefuly knew this and most everyone in attendance hopefully knew it from the start. No, at its inception, this was a labor of love and homage, and, in such a case, Wainwright could have been, should have been (and indeed WAS) forgiven for his obvious deficiences as a stylist for this particular musical material, on this particular occasion.
But Wainwright made the fatal mistake of taking what should have been a one-night-only slice of "tribute," seeing dollar signs, and then inflating the idea to proportions beyond the original premise. The uniqueness of his *own* night of "Judy-veneration" at Carnegie Hall was thus trivialized. Taking the show on the road to London, then to the Hollywood Bowl, opened the door for deserved criticism of the propriety of the main idea, and of Wainwright's inability to really sing the material at hand with anything resembling competence.
Basically, there was absolutely no reason why this "performance" ever deserved to be captured on a commercial recording. None. As a quirky, one-off concert-tribute in NYC, great. As a "brand" to be peddled commercially? Nah.
Wainwright is just plain awful on so many of these Tin Pan Alley tunes, ballads, and jazzy numbers, at least in terms of the "need" to record this evening for posterity and sell it to people who don't know any better, or who are expecting something reasonably good.
Given the brilliance of Garland's original show (and the multi-Grammy-winning, mega-selling 1961 album that captured it), this album is superfluous to the nth degree, and then some. His performances are (at best) mediocre, and the crowd excitement was ostensibly for the novelty of it all.
That being said, the only thing that should have ever seen the light of day as a commercial recording from this (initially) well-intentioned mess was Martha Wainwright's fine version of "Stormy Weather." Even then...meh.
Avoid this record like the plague and buy Rufus's fine original albums or the original Garland record. Rufus is exceptionally talented in his various "alternative" stylisms, but this is a weak effort that (as an album you might buy or continually enjoy) is rather awful...almost inappropriate. Believe me, it does not do Garland any favors (being a blatant commercial knock-off, now in album-form), nor does it do Wainwright any favors. As for the listener...cringe-city.
Again, there's no doubt about Wainwright's gifts as a singer of his own material, but one does get the sense that he really needed/wanted the easy money to have stretched this particular dime so painfully thin.
BTW: his Hollywood Bowl "version" of the "show" (which a few reviewers have mentioned here on Amazon) was indeed an absolute disaster--a shameful thing from a professional musician, especially one who was obviously using someone else's "prop" (Garland's Historic Setlist) as a come-on.
Free Music Review: Rufus Wainwright: You're No Judy Garland
Hit: 1 Stars
I pay very little attention to popular music, so when I heard that Rufus Wainwright was recreating Judy Garland's legendary 1961 Carnegie Hall concert song for song, I wasn't really sure who he was. I had heard the name before: I knew that he was an openly gay singer/songwriter, and that he was the son of singer/songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. But I had never actually heard Rufus sing until I saw him in a guest appearance on "The Graham Norton Show" on BBC America.
I should have known right then that there would be trouble ahead. Wainwright's performance on that show was nasal, sloppy, and intolerable. But, hey, I thought: Maybe it was an off night. Apparently not.
I was greatly looking forward to listening to Wainright's album. I'm a huge Judy Garland fan, and I grew up listening to her Carnegie Hall album. It's a fascinating train-wreck of a performance, like most of the rest of Judy's career, but it's never less than entertaining. I used to listen over and over to "You Go to My Head," dumb-struck that Judy at one point goes up on her lyrics and sings:
You go to my head
And...I forgot the goll-darned words...
To Wainwright's credit, he recreates the flub when he delivers that particular song. But that's really the only thing he shares with Judy Garland. Judy wasn't really so much a great singer as she was an incredible stylist, a hell of a performer, and a tortured soul who was seemingly coming to pieces before your very ears (and eyes, as evidenced by her repeated performances of the same songs with the same orchestrations on her painful-yet-unmissable variety program, "The Judy Garland Show").
As for Rufus Wainwright's renditions, well, to paraphrase the late Lloyd Bentsen, Rufus, you're no Judy Garland. Is this what passes for vocal quality these days? Sloppy intonation, piercing nasal resonance, and a physiological inability to form an "E" vowel? Actually all of his vowels are annoyingly imprecise, but his "E's" are especially egregious. ("Yow made may love yow, Ah didn't wanna dow et...")
I must be in the minority here, because Wainright's sold-out Carnegie Hall audience goes absolutely crazy at the end of every number, apparently under the impression that they're witnessing some kind of genius. On every single number, Wainwright proves that he can't hold a candle to Garland. One possible exception is George and Ira Gershwin's "How Long Has This Been Going On?," which, while still painful, at least illuminates what Wainwright's legion adoring fans might see in him: a quirky, slurring delivery combined with a kind of smoky introspection.
The term "song stylist" is often used euphemistically about someone who, although not the best musician, delivers a song with a certain intangible something. For a terrific example of same, Wainright need look no further than his sister, Martha Wainwright, who makes a guest appearance on the album singing Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather." Sister Martha is no great shakes in the vocal department either, yet she imbues the song with a certain Billie Holliday-esque, whiskey-voiced pathos, a contrast that made what's wrong with her brother's vocal stylings all the more obvious.
Perhaps Rufus Wainwright has built his popularity and reputation more as a songwriter than as a performer, or maybe he's just out of his idiom with Garland's material. Chances are, I'll never find out, because I can't imagine picking up any of his other recordings. I'll stick to Judy Garland, thank you very much. And, unless you're mad for Rufus yourself, yet still want to witness him flailing ineffectually with material he has no business performing, I suggest you do the same.