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HAREM
BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG
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Brightman, who began as an Andrew Lloyd Webber protégée singing over-the-top diva music and has continued to make CD after CD of much the same (including a duet with Andrea Bocelli that almost became a hit), at last finds a subject worthy of her overemphatic manner. Lifted on Brightman’s super-egotistic screams and her music’s soprano orchestrations, the harem is translated from an instrument of debasement to one of supremacy. Granted that Brightman’s Arabic stylings win out only in the narrow, and otherworldly, confines of her up-up-and-away version of European dream pop — at no point in these 14 songs does her voice touch the ground, and seldom does her supporting music display an imperfection. Beautiful, lush, and throbby her dream songs certainly are. Alone of English-language divas, she uses the full palette of rock-classical devices to make the ecstasies of Europop credible. "The Journey Home" verges on Ibiza disco; "Free" approximates, in its tense beat, the sky-high romanticism of French variété; "Misere mei" evokes the goth melancholy of Enigma’s songs. In "Beautiful," "Mysterious Days," and "Until the End of Time," Italian aria meets Celtic lullaby. "You Take My Breath Away," the CD’s last song, recalls the Deep Forest–like Africanism and rhythmic drama of Mylene Farmer’s magnificent "Mylenium." In them one imagines — almost, and briefly — the harem as an abode of freedom.
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