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Shirley Ritenour Provides Pure Pleasure with CD "Both Sides Now" |
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by Bruce-Michael Gelbert | >> see bio |
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photo by Joseph R. Saporito
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| Shirley Ritenour |
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Singer Shirley Ritenour (www.SHIRLEYRITENOUR.com) so impressed listeners in recent Arts Project of Cherry Grove show "Hollywood Bound" that it's no surprise that she is striking as well in her classy CD "Both Sides Now," a mélange of music theater, film, and pop songs, some familiar and some rare, plus a soupçon of classical, on her own SGM (Shirley Girl Music) label. With straightforward, no-nonsense interpretations and singing marked by clarity of tone and diction, Shirley's "Both Sides Now" affords the listener the purest of pleasure and noted cabaret pianist Christopher Marlowe offers strong support. Furthermore, 20 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the CDs will go to Gilda's Club NYC-which assists individuals with breast, ovarian and other cancers, and their families-through Concerned Women of the Grove. Shirley dedicates "Both Sides Now" to her "wonderful partner" Beth.
Our soprano includes both songs that she sang in "Hollywood Bound." Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's "I Have Dreamed," from "The King and I," is hushed, then full-out and brimming with passion, then back to quiet for the ending. Shirley shows, in the song from Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's "Camelot," that she indeed knows "How to Handle a Woman": tenderly.
She begins the CD with Rodgers and Hammerstein as well, "It's a Grand Night for Singing," from "State Fair," sung simply and simply beautifully, and in Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's "My Romance," written for the film "Jumbo," contrasts two statements of the chorus, the first wistful, the lines coming out in quick, short spurts, and the repeat, lingering and opulent.
"I Could Have Danced All Night," from Lerner and Loewe's "My Fair Lady," in which she agreeably changes "he" to "she," aptly finds her well on her way to operetta, which she probes next, in the airy "Art Is Calling for Me" ("I want to be a prima donna, donna, donna)," from Victor Herbert and Harry B. Smith's "The Enchantress," with significant interpolations from the Habanera, from Georges Bizet's "Carmen," and Musetta's Waltz, "Quando me'n vo," from Giacomo Puccini's "La Bohème," concluding the Herbert with a triumphant high A.
Parents are the concern of Shirley's expressions of deep devotion in a pairing of "Romance of the Children," almost a lullaby, by cabaret composer David Friedman and singer Zoelle Montgomery-a name I haven't heard since the 1980s, when Rev. Al Carmines was still presenting the likes of his " "Christmas Rappings" and Snow White" at Judson Memorial Church-and "Mama A Rainbow," from Hal Hackady and Larry Grossman's musical about the Marx Brothers, "Minnie's Boys." Shirley's Jazz Age standard, Milton Ager and Jack Yellen's "Ain't She Sweet" (1923), accompanied by finger snapping as well as Marlowe's pianism, is suitably seductive. She sings "Time After Time"-Frank Sinatra, not Cyndi Lauper-Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne's love song from the film "It Happened in Brooklyn" (1947), with sincerity.
Paul Williams and Roger Nichols' "Rainy Days and Mondays" and title song, Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now," exploit Shirley's lower register, her pop voice, easy and unforced, and never a belt, the selections delivered with honesty. She fervently salutes the 40th anniversaries of the death of Judy Garland and birth of Gay Liberation/Stonewall, with a fervent "Over the Rainbow," by Harold Arlen and E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, from "The Wizard of Oz," with some fluent interpolations, culminating in a high A-flat near the end. Her "An American Hymn," by Molly Ann Leikin, revised with Lee Holdridge, comes off as an anthem, in the Aaron Copland tradition of Americana, that would not be out of place in an art song recital, with a formidable ascent to climactic high A and A-flat in its final line. An encore of "Romance of the Children," this time sans "Mama a Rainbow," concludes this fine effort.
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