Tori Amos

September 19 - 26, 1 9 9 6 [Music Reviews]

Vic-TORI-ous

Ms. Amos at Harborlights; Longy's 11th annual SeptemberFest
by Lloyd Schwartz
Last spring I ran into a former student of mine on his way to Tori Amos's concert at the Wang Center. Tori Amos. I'd seen the art-rock phenom on Letterman and liked her, but my student's passion was another matter. Some friends played me her impressive debut album, Little Earthquakes; then I heard "Horses" on her recent Boys for Pele, and I was hooked. Her riveting Harborlights concert last week was my first live experience with her, and I'm even more impressed.
Amos was a classical child prodigy. She's now 32 and her musicianship is stunning. She writes her own songs, and whether hard-rocking or languorous, they have a rhythmic punch -- and lilt -- that never lets you off the hook. She's also one of the few rock composers I've heard who has a gift for melody. Her best tunes have a surprising little bump in the melodic line, an intervallic leap -- suddenly there, not led up to -- that takes your breath away, then lodges in your mind and keeps you awake nights. Like Schubert or Brahms. The songs are ambitious -- often five or six minutes long, with complex musical structures more like opera arias than pop songs.
There's also her voice -- it's one of the rangiest in pop music. The Globe's Steve Morse called her "Edith Piaf on acid." If she didn't sound so much like herself, you could mistake her at times for anyone from Bonnie Raitt to Barbara Streisand. Amos's "Somewhere over the Rainbow," on her latest extended-play CD, Hey Jupiter, wouldn't have been possible without Streisand's famously slow "Happy Days Are Here Again." In "Little Amsterdam," a sultry number about murder and miscegenation, she reminds me of Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit." She's got a scratchy sexual rasp that she "plays" the way a flute player plays Berio's flutter-tonguing, and an erotic little-girl breathiness that makes me think of Marilyn Monroe. In "Sugar," she actually sang away from the mike, her voice eerily disembodied. But she also has a firm classical soprano that has more body than Linda Ronstadt's.
Amos must also be one of the most dextrous and inventive keyboard players in the business. At Harborlights, she straddled one or another corner of a square piano bench, which allowed her to turn to the huge amplified Bösendorfer on her left or to the facing harpsichord on her right, which she played with either mock-Baroque delicacy or pounding percussiveness. She actually seemed to be riding the "Horses" that would take her to a place where her demons can't go. In "Caught a Lite Sneeze," she switched back and forth between both instruments, rhythmically slapping the side of the amplified piano and even her amplified self. Part of the terror of "Little Amsterdam" was her left-hand boogie-woogie piano.
"Horses" was something of a surprise on another front. On Boys for Pele, it's a haunting, even teasing folk song with a simple but exquisite tune -- a poignant, dreamlike escape from personal nightmare and search for a sexual Eden ("You showed me the meadow/And Milkwood/And Silkwood/And you would if I would/But you never would"). The live version was different. The amplified piano sound was overwhelming, and Amos's improvisations -- more like jazz than rock, especially the keyboard work -- gave the song quite a different spin. It was bigger, harsher, as if coming from within the nightmare itself. People familiar with the songs were getting not mere live re-creations or imitations of what's on the albums but entirely new versions (you can hear similar live concert material on her EPs), some with radical rhythmic syncopations and changes of tempo and texture.
These changes underlined how powerfully this concert -- like the albums -- was put together to show off Amos's range as singer, player, and songwriter. A very uptempo "Talula" (with Steve Caton's powerful guitar and the colored lights swooping and weaving -- you might recognize the song from the soundtrack of Twister) was followed by "Me and a Gun," Amos's autobiographical ballad about a rape from Little Earthquakes, which she sang quietly, without any instrumental accompaniment, and sitting on the edge of her piano bench, leaning in toward the audience with her legs tightly crossed. This live version was even more up-close and intensely personal than the recording, and all the more dramatic coming after the driving "Talula." She followed it with the children's song "This Old Man" ("He plays two, he plays nick-nack on my shoe"). I never thought that song had any suggestive content before, but I sure do now.
Many of Amos's fans -- and I count myself among them -- have trouble with the obscurity and private references in her lyrics. Only after I read several articles did I learn that the "Neil" she mentions in "Horses" ("But will you find me if Neil/Makes me a tree an afro a pharaoh?/I can't go/You said so") is the cartoonist Neil Gaiman, who based his character Delirium on her. I'm daunted by some of the disjointed surrealism. Is Talula a "her," "him," or "it"? What's the execution of Anne Boleyn doing in that song? Some of the words seem chosen more for sound than for meaning.
Since these are songs, not poems, the music mainly transcends the knottiest lyrics. But many of the lyrics have real literary merit. Amos is a ventriloquist, often speaking in more than one voice in a single song. In "Mother," she's both the nurturing life force ("Go go go go now out of the nest") and the tentative young bird flying off ("Mother the car is here, somebody leave the light on"). Even when I can't follow the narrative, there are at least such evocative lines as "These little earthquakes -- doesn't take much to rip us into pieces" or "So you can make me cum that doesn't make you Jesus" ("Precious Things"). And there are trenchant psychological insights. "Boy you still look pretty/When you're putting the damage on," she sings ("Putting the Damage On") in one of the best it's-over-but-you-still-turn-me-on songs I know. In "Me and a Gun" what goes through the rape victim's head is: "I haven't seen Barbados so I must get out of this."
The production itself, full of geometrical, Kandinsky-like light patterns, was slickly, even elegantly atmospheric. Amos herself seemed to change color with the gels. She flung her head back; she danced; then she reached a sudden stillness. At the end of this generous two-hour set, a harmonium was wheeled out to replace the harpsichord. She launched into her final encore, a positively apocalyptic version of Prince's "Purple Rain": "I don't do this very often," she said.
And she seemed on intimate terms with her 5000 fans in the audience. When a woman yelled out, "I saw Trainspotting in Hebrew," Amos responded, "I've done all sorts of things in Hebrew. Hey, I'm a minister's daughter, I'll try almost anything."

Two of our most expressive and communicative classical singers were the highlights of the two free concerts I heard in the Longy School's 11th annual SeptemberFest. The series opener was a program of music composed in America by European composers, which ranged from Dvorák to Bartók (Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano in a steamroller of a performance by Clayton Hoener, Thomas Hill, and Ossie Borosh that I wish had had more lilt -- and more contrast) to 38-year-old Moscow-born BU graduate Jakov Jakoulov's lively and stealthy Viola Sonata from last year (with violist Michael Zaretsky and pianist Bernadette Balkus). Mezzo-soprano Jane Struss led off with eight seldom-heard songs composed between 1928 and 1967 by Felix Wolfes, a distinguished opera conductor and accompanist in Europe who became associated with Tanglewood, the Met, and the New England Conservatory.
These songs, wisely arranged in thematic rather than chronological order, offered a rich variety of attitudes, from lush Romanticism to satiric irony. I loved the mock-gloomy chromaticism in Wolfes's setting of one of my favorite German poems, Christian Morgenstern's "The Two Asses" ("I am so dumb. You are so dumb./Let's go and die together -- come!"), with its sly allusion to Mahler. Struss was in rare form, bringing the words to life with her customary conviction, inwardness, and a sweeping, almost Wagnerian lyric line. Anne Françoise Perrault was her secure and supportive accompanist.
Soprano Nancy Armstrong is another singer who approaches music from the inside. As part of a centennial tribute to Virgil Thomson, accompanied by pianist and Thomson biographer Anthony Tommasini, she sang Thomson's heavenly cycle Mostly About Love (1959), a setting of four funny and poignant poems by Kenneth Koch. If anything, Armstrong and Tommasini have gotten even deeper into the special world of these songs than on their superb 1994 Northeastern recording. The third song, "Let's Take a Walk," ends with an invitation ("Come on"), and Armstrong managed to suggest far more than a walk without actually leering. In the last and best, "A Prayer to St. Catherine," she begs to be "preserved from heartache and shyness," knowing that St. Catherine will neither laugh nor pass judgment. In an evening of other Thomson songs, minor solo and chamber music, and a rare set of choruses that had more than their share of intonation problems, Armstrong's diction was as effortless and crystalline as her vocal tone, as clear as her feeling. "Make the person that sings this song less shy than that person is," the prayer ends, "and give that person some joy in that person's heart."
Amen.