Barbara Cook: Advent Calendar of Song: Twelfth Day of Christmas

A Calendar of Song: Twelfth Day of Christmas 

 So in 1992-1995, I was falling under the spell of the voice of Galina Gorchakova. In the autumn of 1995, I wrote a piece in the FT about her, just before she opened in Tosca at Covent Garden. But I explained that, while she had the most remarkable voice then before the public, that did not make her the greatest singer of the day. “That prize,” I wrote, “goes to Barbara Cook.”

At that time, Russian dancers visiting Britain often made use of a wonderful woman, Tamara Tchinarova Finch (1919-2017), as translator. She, born in Bessarabia, had been a dancer in the 1930s and 1940s, trained in Paris by Olga Presbrazhenskaya and used by George Balanchine in several of his productions before he moved to the United States. She danced for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the years when Colonel de Basil presented it in famous seasons at Covent Garden; later she wound up in Australia with what became the Borovansky Ballet. There she met a handsome young actor named Peter Finch, married him, and returned to London as his wife. His career here took off; they had a daughter, but, when he had an affair with Vivien Leigh, the marriage broke up. (She told all this, not without pain, in her 2007 autobiography, Dancing into the Unknown.) Tamara retrained as a translator, working far away from the performing arts for many years. In due course, however, she began to write for Dancing Times. Since I did too, we came to know each other in the 1980s and 1990s, with a mutual admiration society. And she began to translate both the Royal Ballet when it visited Russia and for the Soviet companies when they came to London. (She always remained friends with Irina Baronova, whom she’d known since 1931. You can see them together in the 2005 documentary film Ballets Russes.) I remember how in 1986 she translated for the great Galina Ulanova, when the Bolshoi returned to Covent Garden that year. Ulanova said (by way of Tamara) she could never forget the excitement of the Bolshoi’s Covent Garden season in 1956, its first important appearance outside Russia in the Soviet era, and the initial hush of the audience. Whereas we would say “you could hear a pin drop,” Tamara loved translating Ulanova’s expression: “You could hear a fly fly in the theatre.” A very gracious woman of beautiful manners and great charm, she told me that she had asked Ulanova if she could help her in any way after the press conference. Yes, Ulanova said quietly, “I would love to see my old dressing room again if that’s possible.” Tamara took Ulanova backstage; they found the dressing room. Ulanova was thrilled by the memories it brought back. But Tamara told me “What I could not tell Tamara was that in the 1930s it had been my dressing room too.”

When I went to see Gorchakova’s Tosca in 1995, there in the foyer was Tamara. I had not realized she was an opera person too; she was. At once, she congratulated me on my FT piece. After the compliments, she then said “But Galina and I have just one question. Who is Barbara Cook?”

I had been a fan of Barbara Cook (1927-2017), thanks to my friend Sally Rettig, since 1986. I forget precisely when in the early 1990s I wrote in the FT words to the effect that she was the only singer of popular music who should be taken seriously by devotees of classical singing; I also wrote that she had the kind of sense of musical architecture we associate with Maria Callas. Or something along those lines: I forget my precise words (she quotes one of my reviews in her autobiography, adding “Try living up to that!”) but I do remember that, when I asked to interview her on her next trip to London, she said “I wasn’t going to do any interviews this time, but in your case I wanted to meet you!” I won’t pretend I knew her well, but we kept in touch, sometimes talking about opera singers across the Atlantic, though not at length. She told me that, when she trained in New York as a young woman, her teacher kept pushing her to learn an operatic aria. Barbara resisted, knowing that wasn’t her area; her idols and models were Judy Garland and Mabel Mercer. But finally, she said, she consented to learn one. On, I asked, what one? “One of Donna Anna’s in Don Giovanni,” she said. “Which?” I asked. She could no longer remember the words, but sang me the first line: it was “Non mi dir,” taxing for any singer. 

Actually she must then have learnt at least one other operatic number. She loved to tell how, when she was auditioning for Leonard Bernstein for Candide (1956), he asked her if she could give him something classical, so she gave him Madam Butterfly’s entrance number. She sang the version with the optional high D (she claimed she did not know that most sopranos avoid it) , and loved to relate how taken aback Bernstein was: “Miss Cook – you are a very brave singer!” When she sang “Glitter and be gay,” she not only cleanly attacked and sustained the top note after “Here I drop my wings” but then, you will be as glad to hear as I was, took a portamento down from it. (“I just had to”!) Bernstein loved that, and, she said, marked it into the score (though I’ve not noticed any other Cunégonde singing it that way).

And - you saw this coming - she found the opportunity after 1995 to ask me: "Who is Galina Gorchakova?" I laughed. But it was a pleasure to talk opera with her in those years.

Her early Broadway career was as an ingénue; there are many great recordings from that era. Really you can’t do better than her 1959 album “From the Heart”, which is all Rodgers and Hart songs: deeply affecting interpretations of classic songs in her youthful soprano voice, with combination of perfect diction, vibrato, and forward placement of the voice that immediately relate her in my mind to Susanne Danco and Lucia Popp. 

Yet in the mid-1970s she reinvented herself as a concert recitalist. Two important things changed: her voice began subtly to mature, and she found ways – with her music director, Wally Harper - of building individual songs into larger units. As to her voice’s maturing: she was the perfect illustration of a point made about how a number of great opera sopranos from Adelina Patti to Lucrezia Bori  (I would make it of Danco and Popp too): the voice that in youth had suited ingénue roles now acquired a new womanly warmth. I wish I had asked her more about her shaping of songs, but I remember she spoke of how Harper and she would look for the rhythmic underpinning and build from there. (She could take a song such as “Ac-cent-Chu-Ate the Positive” and build it into an accumulation of glory the way that Sutherland can build a Donizetti cabaletta.) And she had one wonderful practice she maintained until at least the age of eighty: she always sang one number without microphone, to show her voice could still carry. It wasn’t by any means a massive voice, but I remember that, on her seventieth birthday, she could still be heard in the Albert Hall, without amplification.

This song is “Dancing in the Dark”, the one written in 1931 by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz for the 1931 revue The Band Wagon, where it was sung by John Barker (who had introduced “Tea for Two” and “You Are My Lucky Star”) and danced by Tilly Losch. When I get my time machine, one of the many performances from before my lifetime that I plan to check out is of that Band Wagon production, widely said to be “the finest Broadway revue ever”. It was led by Fred and Adele Astaire, Helen Broderick, and Losch; its music was by Arthur Schwartz, its lyrics by Howard Dietz, its book by George S. Kaufman and Dietz. It was the first show to use the double revolving stage; it was the last time Fred and Adele Astaire appeared together (in 1932, she became the wife of Lord Charles Cavendish and thus daughter-in-law to the Duke of Devonshire). Thirty-two years later, Fred Astaire was in the movie of The Band Wagon, with Cyd Charisse, using several of the same songs in new contexts. In that movie, he and Charisse dance to an orchestral version of “Dancing in the Dark”: it’s among the most beautiful examples of dance understatement, with the couple largely just walking in synch. 

But how many ways one song can be treated! In 1931, Tilly Losch danced to “Dancing in the Dark” - yes, Tilly Losch, whose bizarrely amazing career led her to work with Richard Strauss (the original Whipped Cream ballet), Max Reinhardt, Grete Wiesenthal, Mary Wigman, the Astaires, George Balanchine, Bertoldt Brecht and Kurt Weill (Les Ballets 1933 and The Seven Deadly Sins), Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Leonide Massine, and British and Hollywood films. (Like Adele Astaire, she married into the British aristocracy, though less lastingly. Her second husband, the sixth earl of Caenarvon, had been, by his first marriage, the father of the Lord Porchester who features in The Crown - and, as the queen’s racing manager, in much royal gossip - and succeeded to the Caernavon title.)

Within two months of the 1931 show’s opening, “Dancing in the Dark” had been recorded by Bing Crosby. His version, which scored high in the hit parade, is quite marvellous; I’ll provide the link later. And when he sings it, you can hear that, despite its words about waltzing, it’s a foxtrot, with all the pacing fluency of that dance.

In this 1975 live performance at Carnegie Hall, Barbara Cook transforms it. Not everyone loves this phase of Cook’s singing: I’ve heard it (not this song but in general her post-1970 singing) called too Streisand. To me, she goes straight for the song’s mystery song; her voice is light, her thought is dark – but also radiant. The glow that her voice acquires as the song develops is – I insist - really glorious, and not the ingénue sound any more: it has wonder, vulnerability, innocence and knowledge combined, a whole spectrum. (At every stage, her voice kept developing in texture. At first, I’d always miss the way it had sounded; then I’d start to hear what was new.) And whereas Crosby makes much of the song’s middle section (“What though love is old”), Cook simply omits it: those words are very Thirties. 

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bloH-XoZv2g

Dancin' in the dark 'til the tune ends, 

We're dancin' in the dark and it soon ends. 

We're waltzin' in the wonder of why we're here. 

Time hurries by, we're here, and gone

Lookin' for the light of a new love 

to brighten up the night, I have you love 

and we can face the music together, 

dancing in the dark.

<omitted here by Cook> What though love is old 

what though song is old, 

through them we can be young.

Hear this heart of mine 

make yours part of mine. 

Dear one, tell me that we're one. 

Dancin' in the dark 'til the tune ends ,

we're dancin' in the dark and it soon ends. 

We're waltzin' in the wonder of why we're here. 

Time hurries by, we're here, and gone.

Lookin' for the light of a new love 

to brighten up the night I have you love 

and we can face the music together 

Dancin' in the dark 

dancin' in the dark 

dancin' in the dark

For further listening, Bing Crosby in his 1931 recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCvGvEHWLPo

And here’s Cook in maybe my favourite song from that 1959 Rodgers/Hart album, “Glad to be Unhappy”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q1oT1RFL_M

And here’s that 1994 “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive” (not my favourite song except when she sings it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFH5HkeGHvA both to show how her voice changed and how she builds. Listen to the accumulating attack she adds from 1.53 onward!

And for those who want to feel good about America just now, her 1975 Carnegie Hall account of “Carolina in the Morning”:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfKKOQ7QOHk

Again, the way she shapes the whole harmless-seeming song into an overwhelming crescendo is one of the great glories. 

And - why not - here are Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse dancing "Dancing in the Dark" in 1953: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDHwJrbrp0Y  

Thanks for bearing with me through this series. Happy New Year; here’s to singing