William Dart looks over the recordings of English singer, Olivia Chaney, in the first of two programmes focusing on the Nonesuch label.
Olivia Chaney - Shelter, cover image Photo: Nonesuch Records
Olivia Chaney’s new album for Nonesuch, Shelter, finds her working with American musician Thomas Bartlett. As the CD’s producer, he brings to the venture years of experience working with artists from mandolin maestro Chris Thile and Broadway tenor Mandy Patinkin to groups like Florence and the Machine. In his own work he goes under the stage name of Doveman and in the second of these two Nonesuch programmes I’ll be looking at his new album of Balinese dalliances with composer Nico Muhly.
Chaney’s title for her album, Shelter, has a significant resonance: its sentiments echoing through a number of its ten songs. In the title song, with her singing to just her own guitar, almost naggingly simple with its own tonal glisten, the subject is escape – from a place that others had forced her into – to befriend and face the demons that persist.
When asked about the importance of her folk music background, Olivia Chaney once answered that it entailed, after all the studying, rebelling, exploring and experimenting, the issue was finding transparency and simplicity. Which is certainly the key to many of the songs on Shelter.
Perhaps her performance of Purcell’s "O Solitude" stands to one side here, but its virtuosity, in a way, is one of utter and unforced naturalness, reflecting the way in which this music was put down in a place of retreat, a place that the singer describes as a crumbling eighteenth-century cottage in the austere but magical hills of the North Yorkshire Moors.
Summer passed to autumn during the making of the album, and Chaney created music that reflected this life of enforced simplicity — with no power and just a cold water spring alongside an Arts and Crafts Bechstein piano and an old wood burner, the songs came forth.
There are stories as well as the expected penetrations into hearts and souls. One song has a familiar title — "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" — better known as a 1945 Elia Kazan film and the Betty Smith novel that inspired it. In Chaney’s take on this material, the power of song is used to invoke memories in fragile musical snapshots of the young Francie and her father Johnny Nolan.
Set in an idiom halfway between hymn and folk tune, one feels a history beyond the song’s protagonists. Eventually taking over from Chaney’s echoing piano chords, Jordan Hunt’s violin and Thomas Bartlett’s hand-held synth provide an eerie backdrop when Chaney ends the song with memories of a familiar folktune. And perhaps Francie, looking out of her window in the Williamsburg tenements of Brooklyn, might well have seen the ghosts of a barrow girl like Molly Malone. And others who, passing through Ellis Island, would be the foundations that created the rich diversity, currently threatened, of the USA.
Enjoy these tracks and others of Olivia Chaney's as well as an introduction to the riches of Nonesuch Records, (including historic Carribean music, opera by John Adams, Joshua Rifkin's groundbreaking Bach, and Brian Wilson's 'Smile') by clicking the 'Listen' link above.
Music Details
'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)
'You're the Top' (Porter) – Patricia Barber
The Cole Porter Mix
(Blue Note)
'I Bid you Goodnight' (Trad) – Joseph Spence, Pinder Family
The Real Bahamas
(Nonesuch)
'I must have been hysterical, from The Death of Klinghoffer' (Adams) – Janice Felty
The Death of Klinghoffer
(Nonesuch)
'Magnificat' (Bach) – Joshua Rifkin
Magnificat
(Nonesuch)
'Cabinessence' (Wilson) – Brian Wilson
Smile
(Nonesuch)
'Montagne, que tu es haute' (Trad arr Garchik) – Olivia Chaney, Kronos Quartet
Folk Songs
(Nonesuch)
'There's not a swain' (Purcell arr Britten) – Ian Bostridge, Graham Johnson
Britten Purcell Realisations
(Hyperion)
'There's not a swain' (Purcell) – Olivia Chaney
The Longest River
(Nonesuch)
'Imperfections' (Chaney) – Olivia Chaney
The Longest River
(Nonesuch)
'The First Time Ever I saw Your Face' (MacColl) – Offa Rex
The Queen of Hearts
(Nonesuch)
'Sheepcrook and Black Dog' (Trad) – Offa Rex
The Queen of Hearts
(Nonesuch)
'Shelter' (Chaney) – Olivia Chaney
Shelter
(Nonesuch)
'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' (Chaney) – Olivia Chaney
Shelter
(Nonesuch)
