Piaf to Pop, the new show from Christine Bovill at The Queen’s Hall Edinburgh tonight, could be considered a follow up to her award winning show “Paris”.
Many of us who have followed Christine’s homages to the great singers of “Chansons Française“ and in particular Edith Piaf, will however see this show as the latest part of a journey exploring the wonderful history of French songs from the 1920s/1930s onwards that Christine has taken us all on over the years in her own unique vocal and presentation performance style.
This show covers a period of roughly 10 years of music from the late 1950s to the late 1960s and how the birth of rock’n’roll in the USA and to some extent Britain influenced forever not only French music but French youth-culture.
As Jennifer Redmond (piano) and Charlie Stewart (violin, but also playing double-bass later) introduce Christine Bovill to the stage with the opening bars of "La Vie en rose", we are obviously starting this show in classic French chanson style and that opens up the door for these wonderful songs which were like little three minute operas full of wonderful stories, wonderful characters and no subject matter off limits.
More importantly these were songs that were musically written for the very phrasing, the very sound of the French language itself. The introduction of this new music taking English lyrics and translating them to French meant now that... read the full review here