If you don’t yet know who Audra McDonald is, then you will, you surely will, after hearing this, her debut album. It’s from Nonesuch, which at once tells you that it will be more of a statement, a manifesto, than is generally the case (remember Dawn Upshaw’s?). McDonald is a Broadway star, and then some. So far (and she is still in her twenties) she has achieved a hat trick of Tony awards (Carousel, Master Class and Ragtime). In the Broadway transfer of our own National Theatre production of Rodger and Hammerstein’s Carousel she stole her way into everyone’s hearts with her homespun and sweetly sung Carrie; in Terrence McNally’s Master Class she sang the Letter Aria from Verdi’s Macbeth – and had people checking their programmes to confirm that this was indeed the same Audra McDonald; in Ragtime she found pride and defiance in the soulful melismas of just two numbers – she built a whole character, a whole lifetime of experience from them.
So just how many characters, how many voices, does Audra McDonald have within her? Listen to the album, check out the many styles she embraces, and you still won’t have the answer. Because she’s a singing actress, and singing actresses have a habit of constantly reinventing themselves; especially when the voice is as flexible as this one. Essentially, you might say, McDonald is a lyric soprano (Juilliard trained). It’s a lovely, natural, warm, ‘covered’ sound. But then she sings sweet and low down and a smokiness pervades. And the smokiness occludes, but not for long, the gospel truth, the rigour and rasp, of those throaty melismas. And then the belt voice shows itself and you’d better watch out. Because above all, this is a truthful voice. It looks you straight in the eyes and tells you what it thinks and feels and understands.
So there you have the singer. What about the songs? Well, as I said, this is a Nonesuch album and Nonesuch artists are wont to be defined by their adventurous choice of material. You won’t know a single one of these songs. You very likely won’t know any of the five composers. But what you will know when you finish listening is that American song-writing is in pretty good shape. These are ‘emergent’ talents, and praise be that someone in the recording industry still has the enterprise to showcase them. Each time you play the album (and you will, often) a new favourite will emerge. That much I can promise. The range is extraordinary – all human emotion is here – but there is a common denominator: theatricality. And McDonald plays it to the hilt. Not to draw attention to herself, mind (though, heaven knows, some of the singing is hair-raising), but to make the songs live in her and in us.
Briefly, here’s what we have. There’s Adam Guettel (grandson of Richard Rodgers and the composer of a show called Floyd Collins which I came to the conclusion – in these very pages, 7/97 – was something of a masterpiece). He’s represented by four numbers (two of them specially written for the album). I say ‘numbers’, but one – a duet ‘Come to Jesus’ from his show Saturn Returns – is a show in itself, dramatically counterpointing two letters at the moment of their writing: one from a young woman awaiting an abortion, the other from her departing lover. The refrain of the song – which assumes the manner of a Presbyterian hymn – achieves a kind of ecstasy as it travels through chromatic queasiness towards a higher purpose. Guettel (who joins McDonald as the other voice) is perhaps the most sophisticated, certainly the quirkiest, of the composers featured here. His skill and originality lies in always finding the most appropriate musical metaphor for his texts. And there’s many a catch in his freewheeling melodies which identifies them as insistently, unmistakably, his own. It was a neat idea to redress the unsettling ‘Come to Jesus’ with ‘Baby Moon’, a song which so winningly anticipates new life. The great thing about Guettel’s word-setting is that it comes out as natural as the spoken word.
Ricky Ian Gordon, who sets texts by Langston Hughes for his song-cycle Only Heaven, has a similar gift for making melody out of the music of the words. His James Agee setting A lullaby is like an apostrophe to Barber’s Knoxville: childhood dreams waking up to adult reality. Then there’s Jenny Giering’s I Follow which elevates the folk idiom into an altogether new kind of art song. Michael John LaChiusa’s Way back to Paradise – a punchy, impatiently syncopated, gospel number (with Dawn Upshaw – a one-woman backing-group – returning the compliment of McDonald’s appearance on her Rodgers and Hart album) – is from his upcoming musical updating of the Medea myth entitled Marie Christine, which McDonald will star in later this year. The same composer’s ‘Tom’ (from his musical reworking of Schnitzler’s La Ronde) is a wry and wistful piece of narrative flashback-ing whose effusive climax is all the illicit kisses of the world rolled into one. And maybe, just maybe, the two songs you’ll straightway come out humming will be by Jason Robert Brown. ‘You don’t know this man’ (from the recently opened Parade, a musical dramatization of the Leo Frank murder trial) nods to Sondheim as surely as it begs our indulgence, while the infectious ‘Stars and the Moon’ (a catchy tune and still catchier lyric well-met) suggests Carole King or Carly Simon Broadway bound.
Arrangements, musical direction, production, presentation, packaging are all we’ve come to expect from Nonesuch. But the main thing is you come away wanting more. More songs where these came from, and more Audra McDonald to sing them.ES