I really like it, especially "Wedding Song" and "Why Do We Build the Wall" and "Our Lady of the Underground" and... oh, most of it.
The songs that I've played more often than the rest appear to be "Way Down Hadestown," "Hey, Little Songbird," "Wait for Me," "Why We Build the Wall," "Our Lady of the Underground," and "Flowers (Eurydice's Song)," but really, the entire thing.
(I also love the Brecht-and-Weill strain in the opera, which almost never expresses itself musically: "When the Chips Are Down" calls back to Die Dreigroschenoper's Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral, but that's the only explicit reference. And yet somehow you know it could have been staged in 1937 with a bare stage and chalkmarks on the floor and that would also have been right.)
Greg Brown is good, but I'd love to hear it with Tom Waits doing that part.
In this one instance, actually, I would not prefer Tom Waits. The smoke and cinder-glinting fool's gold in his voice are right for the Devil, but not for Hades. Greg Brown sounds like caverns and black water, subterranean. You can hear the Styx in him.
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The songs that I've played more often than the rest appear to be "Way Down Hadestown," "Hey, Little Songbird," "Wait for Me," "Why We Build the Wall," "Our Lady of the Underground," and "Flowers (Eurydice's Song)," but really, the entire thing.
(I also love the Brecht-and-Weill strain in the opera, which almost never expresses itself musically: "When the Chips Are Down" calls back to Die Dreigroschenoper's Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral, but that's the only explicit reference. And yet somehow you know it could have been staged in 1937 with a bare stage and chalkmarks on the floor and that would also have been right.)
Greg Brown is good, but I'd love to hear it with Tom Waits doing that part.
In this one instance, actually, I would not prefer Tom Waits. The smoke and cinder-glinting fool's gold in his voice are right for the Devil, but not for Hades. Greg Brown sounds like caverns and black water, subterranean. You can hear the Styx in him.