Tonight's pressing question: does Jesus Christ Superstar make good house-cleaning music? More precisely, does Jesus Christ Superstar, the 2009 Swedish cast, make good house-cleaning music? It's worth noting that I have found a Romanian CD, Epoca de Aur, does the best job at keeping me on task when it comes to the performance of domestic duties. It has just the right mix of upbeat material and incomprehensible lyrics. I thought the Swedes could do right by me at least in terms of incomprehensibility, but of course I'm way too familiar with these songs to not know what's going on at any given time, and if I know what's going on, I start thinking about what's going on instead of paying attention to my labors. Also, I find myself slowing down during the slower numbers. On the other hand, one is less likely to whine about how hard it is to clean house when one is listening to Jesus confronting the prospect of being hated, hit, hurt and nailed to a tree.
And how does this version compare to last night's? Good news--sometime between 1972 and 2009, the Swedes fired the saxophonist. Also, I had the sense last night that the cast was putting in a lot of effort, and that's a bad thing--a rock opera should never sound like work. Maybe the singers have a bit more training in this version or something--I don't get that sense of constant struggle, of wrestling with the (admittedly) demanding score, and that makes for a much more pleasant listening experience. I have to mention in particular the great falsetto employed by the 2009 Jesus, something he seems to be able to just launch up there at will.
This cast employs a different translation, I think, because instead of "Everything's Alright" being rendered "Allting är allright" as it was yesterday, it's "Allting är okej nu." Help me out, linguists: does that mean "All things are okay now"? If so, what are the theological implications of things being "okay," not "alright"? It's not quite "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," is it?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment