"If music be the food of love, play on,/ Give me excess of it,” commands Duke Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. And to celebrate today’s 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death, Rufus Wainwright has obliged, decking out a selection of sonnets in a dazzling array of musical genres from high opera, through grungey rock, sweet Seventies pop, minimalist piano ballads, world trance and Berlin cabaret.
Those who have always found the Canadian singer-songwriter’s baroque pop
over-egged and theatrical must suspect this is the album which will
clinch their argument. Even as a fan, I read the list of contributors
with a mixture of excitement and concern: Siân Phillips, Florence Welch,
Carrie Fisher, Helena Bonham Carter, Peter Eyre and – yikes! – William
Shatner? Had Wainwright boldly gone too far this time?
Not at all. All My Loves turns out
to be a box of delights: an album whose constantly shifting moods,
romantic melodies and sly twists of musical wit are a perfect fit for
the swoons, spite and slick conceits of the poems. The fluidity of
gender, age and nationality of the voices delivering the spoken word
sections give texture to the sound and universality to the emotions.
There’s always something surprising around the corner: at the end,
Sonnet 87 is delivered by the 92-year-old East German actress Inge
Keller.
Wainwright’s interest in the sonnets
dates back more than a decade, when the late composer Michael Kamen
commissioned him to score Sonnet 29 (When in Disgrace with Fortune and
Men’s Eyes). Director Robert Wilson asked for more music for a 2009
theatre piece, then the San Francisco Symphony called on him to
orchestrate five more sonnets, three of which appeared on Wainwright’s
2010 album All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu. The gorgeous resignation
of his take on A Woman’s Face was a stand-out track. As a gay man who
once told me he always goes “for straight drug addicts”, he inhabited
every line of Sonnet 20, in which the poet laments that since Nature has
“prick’d out” a beautiful young man’s body for women’s pleasure, he
must settle for friendship.
The song is given two treatments here: early on there’s an elegant, classical delivery by Austrian soprano Anna Prohaska,
all that yearning corseted up by the lofty control of her courtly art.
It’s then brought up to date in a sighed pop version by Wainwright.
Producer Marius de Vries suspends the weary piano and pavement pounding
drums in slightly psychedelic synth effects. Shatner’s part is also
pretty trippy, while Welch turns in a surprisingly delicate performance
on a sugar pop setting of When in Disgrace, which almost turns into
ABBA’s Chiquitita towards the end.
De Vries has form with modernising Shakespeare: he worked as a composer and producer on the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Here he does a great job splicing Wainwright’s restless style shifts into a coherent sonic adventure.
There are a few awkward moments when Wainwright struggles to shoehorn
the Shakespeare into the tunes. And others when he over-clutters the
music. But he’s so playful, inventive and heartfelt that even though
this album clocks in at 55 minutes, he leaves you wanting him to play on
and on. (
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