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Scan
Courtesy
of Elissa Roberts: 
Review:
15-year-old is a Broadway star in the making
Source:
Fort
Worth Star-Telegram
Date: 9
September 2001 |
Charlotte Church, billed as a operatic prodigy, proves
to be more of a pop diva.DALLAS _ Welsh vocalist Charlotte Church, 15, has been billed as an operatic soprano prodigy;
Saturday night she made her first live appearance in this region in a gala concert with the Dallas Symphony and the orchestra's
principal pops conductor, Richard Kaufman, at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.
For this listener, whose acquaintance with Church has been via her
depressingly expressionless recordings, the performance was a pleasant surprise. No, she will never sing `Butterfly' at La Scala,
which her program biography claims as her ambition. Church has
clearly taken a different path, down which there will be no turning back
toward operatic ambitions.
She has adopted the style of the Broadway diva, a la Streisand, with
shameless shifts of timbre and wide open vocal belting. Though in her spoken commentary between songs she's just a nervous,
extroverted teen-ager, chattering about shoes and shopping, she can turn on the star quality when she sings and readily
present the grand ego and grand (if limited) emotionalism of the diva.
Whether she can translate this into a sustained career remains to be
seen. `Summertime, Bali Hai, Can't Help Loving That Man of Mine' and other Broadway chestnuts all proved effective vehicles for
Church; she can fling her arms wide and embrace the audience with the best of them. She can evoke the past in `Bridge Over
Troubled Water' and make them pull out their hankies with `Danny Boy;' she can even turn into a child, for a just a moment,
in old Irish folk songs.
The main question at this point, and the factor that determines whether
she will be forgotten by the time she's 20, will be whether she can learn to act.
Before and between sets by Church, the orchestra, conductor Kaufman and
the Dallas Symphony Chorus provided a pleasant, generally harmless range of light classics and pops, ranging from an
excerpt from Wagner's `Tannhauser' to a flashy arrangement of `The Yellow Rose of Texas.'
- Wayne Lee Gay
Review: Endearing voice of Church joins DSO
Source:
The
Dallas Morning News
Date: 9
September 2001 |
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra's 2001-02 season is more or less under way. Not the 100 percent classical part of it – that won't begin until next week – but a black-tie gala on Saturday night that included a dash of classical and a dash of folk/pop served as a pleasant inaugural.
The evening's star was Welsh teenager Charlotte Church. She's only 15, but don't hold that against her. She has a beautiful and surprisingly rich soprano, and on Saturday night she often exuded the kind of indefinable vocal charisma that draws a deep emotional response from a listener. She's on pitch and musical, though her voice may be a bit small by operatic standards. Amplification took care of that.
Her partners for the evening were the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and principal pops conductor Richard Kaufman. Her first group of numbers included songs by Leonard Bernstein and Richard Rodgers, a couple of Irish songs, La Pastorella and what has become something of a signature piece for her, Pie Jesu.
They all were bewitching enough – especially an Irish song accompanied solely by harpist Susan Dederich-Pejovich – that I regretted having to leave before Charlotte's second appearance to meet an early deadline. She introduced each number herself, and the way she sometimes almost jumped with girlish glee betrayed her youth.
The evening opened with a festival choral piece from Tannhäuser by Wagner, spotlighting the Dallas Symphony Chorus, and included other music by Humperdinck and Walton, with music of the movies and Texas scheduled for later.
The evening opened with a party in a large tent next to the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. The high point of this was the auctioning (for $147,000) of an Aston Martin sports car. This was followed by dinner in the Meyerson lobby.
The festivities pushed the concert part of the evening back to a scheduled 9 p.m., though the logistics of getting everybody inside delayed the start. Chatty latecomers competed with the introducers to make the opening a bit chaotic.
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