Cohen for a song, and is Boris Godunov?
I’m increasingly drawn to the songs of ancient troubadors who can’t really sing all that well these days, and I had Leonard Cohen placed third in my personal line behind Tom Waites and Randy Newman.
I still think Waites is the greatest and Newman the funniest, but Cohen’s current concert tour must be one of the most remarkable in the history of popular music making. His three-hour gig at the Albert Hall was simpy the most beautiful, gracious concert I’ve ever seen, and one of the most moving summations of a creative life you could imagine.
Cohen hasn’t been in London in fourteen years. “I was sixty back then, ” he says, “just a kid with a crazy dream.” Still slim, stylish, trilby-hatted and clear-skinned, the man’s a marvel, and he drew us to him in a manner I’ve only seen rivalled by Frank Sinatra in this same venue.
The level of musicianship was stunningly high: a six piece band including virtuosi on mandolin, saxophone and bass guitar, as well as three girl singers and fantastic technical back-up. We had all the songs we love except for Joan of Arc, and the atmosphere built to a tremendous crescendo with his marching battle-songs, “First We Take Manhattan” and “Democracy.”
Having bent, crouched and keened in his sedate and charming way, he skipped around the stage like a leprauchan at the end, thanking us for helping keep his songs alive. He must have sung them thousands of times. But each one sounded like he’d just thought of it. This was consummate artistry and a display of total genius and utter modesty at the same time.
Times are hard, suffering is everywhere. But as Cohen says/sings, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” He’ll stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on his tongue but Hallelujah.
The hall was packed, which is more than you could say of the Coliseum on Saturday night for one of just nine performances this season of the new Boris Godunov directed by Tim Albery.
Sure, the design resembles an old garden shed sliding down the side of a hill, but Musorgsky’s music in this rarely seen seven-scene version is tremendous, and the performance of Peter Rose in the title role has been unjustly lampooned, if you ask me.
The credit must be truly crunching if this masterpiece isn’t drawing the town on a weekend, or is it just that the popular subscription base of the ENO is slipping away, like the garden shed?
No-one who loves great music would want to miss this production. At the very least, the ENO is still worth going to for the programmes. The Boris one contains a brilliant essay by Gerard McBurney, Simon’s brother, on the composer’s art, and much else besides. And the ENO orchestra under Edward Gardner outdoes itself in magnificence each time I turn up there.
Memories of Sinatra at the Albert Hall — where he gave his last concert on British soil with the Buddy Rich orchestra — reminds me of an anecdote passed on to me by Les Miz lyricist Herbie Kretzmer.
Buddy was on his deathbed and a nurse asked, was he comfortable? He was. Was anything troubling him? It was. She leant forward to catch his latest breath. What was it? “Country music.”
Even old Buddy, I reckon, might have made an exception for some of the upbeat, jangling, hillbilly splurges of Leonard Cohen and his sidekicks on a night I shall never forget.