More than 1,500 music lover attended the concert in downtown Springfield.
Judy Collins
SPRINGFIELD - She’s looked at the music business from all sides, now, and after more than half a century, Judy Collins proved she is still in it for keeps.
Performing with Maestro Kevin Rhodes and the Springfield Symphony Orchestra for 1,524 concert-goers in Symphony Hall on Saturday evening, Collins took us on a tour of her musical life.
From early Joni Mitchell covers like “Chelsea Morning” and “Both Sides Now,” to more recent ballads like her own “Song for Sarajevo” and “In the Twilight,” Collins brought to bear her limpid, vibrato-free voice, hardly touched by time, and still as direct as an arrow to the heart.
With her musical director, Russell Walden, seated at the piano and Rhodes on the podium, Collins rambled round in the eclectic stew of styles that she has explored over the decades. She credited Jo Stafford for introducing her to the keening ballad “Barbara Allen,” and referenced her father, a blind singer and radio host, in a breezy Gershwin medley of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” “Love Walked In,” and “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.”
John Denver fans were treated to a mash-up of “Leaving On A Jet Plane” and “Country Roads.”
A long time admirer of Belgian songsmith Jacques Brel, and a frequent recorder of his music, Collins included an understated and nostalgic account of his “Marieke,” prefaced by an introspective introduction/translation.
Canadian cowboy Ian Tyson, another Collins friend from the “folkie”days of the 1960s (who continues to record fantastic material even after some decline in vocal health) was represented by “Someday Soon.”
Collins took over the piano to croon “Since You’ve Asked,” her very first original tune, written, she recalled, after protégé Leonard Cohen asked “Why have you never written your own songs?”
Remaining at the keyboard, she delivered what may have been the most compelling, touching, and intense performance of the evening, a song for her recently deceased mother called “In the Twilight.” For anyone whose parent’s or loved one’s light has been dimmed by dementia, this song pushed all the buttons. The poetry was elegant, yet vulnerable, and the images as clear and true as the voice that painted them. Russ Walden’s orchestration gave the song further depth and character.
Collins’ easy stage manner and loosely spinning memory wheels charmed and engaged her audience, and the glassy youth and affirmation in her voice helped all of us forget time for an hour or so, and go to the place where there might, in fact, be ice cream castles in the air.
Rhodes and his colleagues warmed up the Symphony Hall crowd with classic pops fare in the Arthur Fiedler tradition. Two high-speed Rossini overtures, the “Barber of Seville,” and the “William Tell” (the gallop portion familiar to Lone Ranger fans), rubbed elbows with Bizet’s “Carmen” Prelude and the plaintive “Air” from J. S. Bach’s D major Orchestral Suite.
Rhodes was in rare form, mimicking the gestures from the Bugs Bunny cartoon, “Rabbit of Seville,” so indelibly associated with the “Barber” overture. One could almost hear Elmer Fudd singing “Ooooh….where do I get that wabbit?” and Bugs responding, “Whaaaat…would you want wid a wabbit?”
How much fun would a whole evening of those overtures be?