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CD Review by Jack Nichols
Porter's piano playing has zest and a certain tinny sound characteristic of 1930s recordings. Reading the long list of songs on the album, I recognized only three: "C'est Manifique", "I Love Paris", and "When Love Comes Your Way." Stylists like Ella Fitzgerald or Dionne Warwick singing Cole Porter do probably sound better to most of us than the composer's happy efforts. But there are reasons why having this particular and peculiar CD can satisfy. To go in this direction , please note that Porter's lyrics have been printed in the CD's booklet. Reading these lyrics, while listening to the magnificently sissified tenor-type tones the composer brings into play as he sings, eventually creates some degree of appreciation of how Cole Porter, a hopelessly happy-go-lucky romantic, wrote mostly clear, simple lyrics that resounded with a sophistication and profundity unrivaled in popular American romantic music. Cole Porter's songs, I must admit, influenced my early romantic life to a greater extent, probably, than any other American songwriter. At eight I was introduced by my mother to "Begin the Beguine" and, in the 1950s, on my own, I discovered the passionate "Night and Day", the anarchistic "Anything Goes," the mature "I Concentrate on You," the fatalistic "I've Got You Under My Skin," and the hopelessly masochistic but nevertheless impossibly beautiful "So in Love".
The first piece on Cole Sings Porter, "Maidens Typical of France" is a camp satire, a hoot about nuns and the education they receive in a French convent: We are maidens typical of France In a convent educated. From the wicked clutches of romance, We have all been segregated. What is most gripping about Cole Porter, I feel as I listen to this tinny recording, is the extraordinary way in which he has wedded what Gibran calls "love's peace and love's pleasure" with his full realization that his approaches to romance are irrational. Still, he encourages heartfelt leaps into romantic irrationality while letting the chips fall wherever. "C'est Manifique" explains such a realization:
If you follow your heart, not your mindLove is waiting there again, To take you up in the air again. And in "When Love Comes Your Way," Cole Porter's full-fleshed paeans to love capture the essences of his philosophy: When love comes your way Take ev'ry bit of joy you can borrow, Be carefree, be gay, Forget the world and say Goodbye to sorrow. Simply live for today And never think at all of tomorrow For just when you are sure that love has Come to stay— Then love flies away. |
Koch International Classics has released Cole Sings Porter, a rare collection of Cole Porter songs that are both sung and accompanied on the piano by the late Cole Porter. The 22 cuts on this CD are from the shows Can Can (1952-3) and Jubile (1935). The recordings appear to have been "at home" productions, and during his rendition of "C'est Magnifique", the rattle of sheet music can be heard as he plays.
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