Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating and very successful work, 13 Dec 2008
Some of the ungenerous views this recording has received I think might come from the idea reviewers have that Corigliano has tried (and failed) to write songs in the style of Bob Dylan. This is emphatically not the case. Corigliano has written his own settings of Dylan's lyrics, and apparently had not even heard the original songs when he put his cycle together. These Corigliano settings are very successful, and this recording very good (Hila Plitmann's singing is sensational). All of the songs for me 'worked', and it's a great tribute to Dylan's lyrics that this is so.
You won't go away, even after several hearings, humming Corigliano's tunes as you might do Dylan's. That wasn't the point. But what powerfully impressed me was how Coriglaino has connected with the lyrics, and especially the range of feeling within them. I think he gets the sadness and strangeness of the songs well. (Corigliano's Mr Tambourine Man may be less tuneful than Dylan's, but it's stranger - in a good way, I think!) And I like the way the cycle hangs together as a whole: as Corigliano says in the booklet, you move from small-town innocence through political awareness and protest to a final generous vision.
Coming from the angle of (American) classical music, I also found it very touching how many echoes of earlier composers there are in this music, especially Charles Ives and Samuel Barber. I think it's Barber's Knoxville, Summer of 1915 that Corigliano is 'referencing' in his setting of Clothes Line. There's also, surely, a slight allusion (so muted as really only to be a sort of sound memory) to Beethoven's Ode to Joy in Corigliano's Chimes of Freedom?
A highly successful work and recording, thoughtful and thought-provoking. Just don't go for it if you're expecting to hear Dylan's tunes, or if you happen to take a rather limited view of Dylan's lyrics (i.e. only he knows how to set them to music).
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Oh dear, 18 Oct 2008
I really enjoy the Concerto's so I thought I would try these as they sounded interesting.
I suggest you listen to the real Dylan or some of the great covers of these songs. These are embarrassing, you can tell he has not heard a note of the originals, the vocal style with these lyrics just makes you laugh and think of your granddad having a dance with the "hip kids". All Along the Watch Tower is a particular highlight, I have not laughed so much in years. Just listen to the soprano coming in. I think Corigliano's talents are elsewhere.
If you like out of place cross over that misses the point of the lyrics, then this is for you.
Good performances and 100% to them for their efforts to make this sound worth while, even if they do fail.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, don't play this song for me, 4 Sep 2008
Naxos has just released the world premiere recording of John Corigliano's "Mr. Tambourine Man," in which the noted composer has created new musical settings for the lyrics to seven famous Bob Dylan songs. The project has " high concept" written all over it, and will doubtless please the NPR "Morning Becomes Eclectic" crowd. While there's no denying the sincerity of everyone involved, the results to my ears sound forced and awkward. Corigliano's orchestral arrangements range from lugubrious string sections to brass and woodwind passages full of rapid tempo shifts and jangling percussion, yet they actually divert attention from the words rather than support them. And each tune seems to drag on forever, especially the 7-minute "Chimes of Freedom." The lyrics are sung in an operatic-cum-art song style by soprano Hila Plittmann, who tries mightily--but ultimately fails--to inject a sense of naturalism into her vocal interpretations. Plitmann has an amazing voice that she is able to bend in weird and wonderful ways, but her delivery is too precise, too studied to make the words come alive. Part of the problem is the lyrics themselves. They're written in a streetwise vernacular that just doesn't work without Dylan's rough-edged delivery. Fortunately, this disc also includes a much more successful piece: a three-movement orchestral suite titled "Three Hallucinations," which is based on Corigliano's score for Ken Russell's film "Altered States." The tense, trancelike tonalities in the opening movement immediately establish an ominous mood fully appropriate to Russell's hallucinatory, cold sweat visuals. Corigliano's music successfully evokes and sustains the film's fever pitch atmosphere and is marked by numerous shifts of tone, at times radiating moments of eerie calm, at others exploding into frenzied atonality.
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~ John Corigliano
~ John Corigliano
by Steven Heine
~ Adam Kruszewski
~ Van Morrison
