Album
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I Let the Music SpeakFleshquartet Percussion, Anne Sofie von Otter Vocals
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The problem with singing the songs of the Swedish pop group ABBA skillfully is that they weren't particularly meant to be sung that way. The virtue of the group's two female vocalists lay in the way they blended themselves into the overall texture of a song, including especially its electronic conception, rather than in traditional expressiveness. The woman singing in an ABBA song is, implicitly or explicitly, Everywoman, and it's no accident that the two bookends of ABBA's careers recorded here, the pre-ABBA "I Am Just a Girl" and one of the very last two ABBA songs, "The Day Before You Came," both treat the theme of an ordinary woman leading an utterly ordinary life that is suddenly redeemed by romantic love. Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were studio vocalists, subsidiary to a production conception like other singers of the disco era in which they mostly worked. Mezzo soprano Anne Sofie von Otter is certainly to be commended for her unusually adventurous forays into the pop realm, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that she strikes a glancing blow off ABBA's music rather than connecting with it head on.
Listening to this album is a strange experience in many ways. ABBA's songs are light, but they have not turned out to be trivial; the artistry involved in the best of them has kept them interesting to audiences for more than a quarter century now. Von Otter's enthusiasm for the material is obvious, and the melodies seem as though they ought to be strong enough to stand up to interpretations alternative to the ones ABBA's male producers and songwriters, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, originally gave them. Yet she gives detail to vocal lines that depend on being featureless. Von Otter seems to be aware of the problems involved. She avoids the big ABBA hits, except for the one with the best pure melody, "The Winner Takes It All." She chooses the most complex ABBA pieces, the ones that showed the subtlety of Andersson and Ulvaeus as song composers. And she includes several post-ABBA works by the team, from the musical Chess, from a Swedish-language musical, and from a set of folk-ish Swedish-language songs (these last two, annoyingly, are summarized but not translated into English). The result is an album that's consistently fascinating to listen to, and that does no disservice to the considerable reputation of its star, but that leaves the listener marveling anew at just how tricky it is to bridge the gap between pop and classical singing. The electronic accompaniments of ABBA are replaced with acoustic instruments (it's often an accordion that fills in for the synthesizers), and these accompaniments, with Andersson himself briefly on hand, are well executed but sort of beside the point. To set the powerful voice of Anne Sofie von Otter against a recasting of ABBA's songs in modern electronics might have been a more fruitful idea.
© James Manheim, All Music Guide
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© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.
