Some years ago I bought a couple of condenser microphones
and called some singer-friends to come home to record several songs,
mainly from musicals.
It was just for fun, but we learned a lot in the process,
and I think we had a great time. Today I
discovered a folder with all these recordings
and thought it would be nice to share them here, as a nostalgic exercise.
I remember the musical Flor de Nit with special delight.
The lyrics were written by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and the music
was composed by Albert Guinovart. When I played as a repertoire pianist at the musical
theatre school Memory the teachers proposed this musical
as a final course project for the students. There was a problem,
though: no piano score existed. So I worked hard to write it,
for almost all the themes. Sadly, I wrote it with pencil and in a cryptic
style, so I cannot share it here for others to play.
Maybe even I am unable to read it after so much time. I have great
memories from that time. Especially when the composer himself came to see
one of the performances. It was one of these really
special moments in a lifetime. After that, I called the great Betty Lamb,
a fabulous soprano who recorded many pieces with me.
Some of them are better recorded than others, but after many years,
it is the remembrance what has value to me, not the
technical details. First of all, let's listen to the main theme of
the musical, a delicious song with a flavor of copla,
recorded during a raining evening:
I think Betty was especially great in this latter performance,
and the audio quality was much better as well. We were learning a bit!
Another set of recordings came with a concert we prepared with Desirée Povedano.
We simply called it Desi & Friends and
she had the privilege of being accompanied by Betty Lamb herself and the great Olalla Muiños,
a stunning singer with a great
voice and an even greater personality.
We recorded many songs, mainly R&B even though we have almost no black blood in our veins.
But it was very fun. I list here some of the best (or funniest) moments:
I think Betty gives the song a true old Broadway style. Only
a living musical encyclopedia like her could grasp that flavor so well.
The second and third were from JSR's Songs for a New World:
I became nostalgic today and wanted to share these moments. They were fun and great times.
I have very good memories of all these singers and I hope we can
record more songs in the future.
I don't know why, but when you summon your happy memories, music always comes to mind.
From the last recordings, at least
four years have passed, during which I heavily turned into science.
But now I realize how I really miss to play songs.
One day the universe may be understood in terms of science,
but other worlds out there will have discovered the same science.
However, each music piece is unique in the whole universe, and that makes it truly trascendental.