Prince & The New

An apocryphal tale says Juilliard Music Conservatory-trained musicians Michael Kamen, Marty Fulterman, and Dorian Rudnytsky decided in the late '60s in New York that they could make bigger bucks as rock stars than as classical musicians. The results of this legendary experiment were inconclusive. Forming the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, they broke with tradition on their first two albums – 1968's self-titled debut and Faithful Friends the next year – by using classical music instruments in rock songs and using rock instruments on classical pieces…

London Records will issue brand new two-CD deluxe editions of the Fine Young Cannibals two studio albums in December. The band’s debut single ‘Johnny Come Home’ was a top ten hit in 1985 and the self-titled debut album reached number 11 in the UK charts the same year after further singles were issued, including a cover of Elvis Presley’s ‘Suspicious Minds’. In 1989, Fine Young Cannibals hit the commercial stratosphere, particularly in America, with The Raw & The Cooked. The first two singles ‘She Drives Me Crazy’ and ‘Good Thing’ both were number one singles in the USA and were top ten hits in Britain (and around the world). The band split in 1992 although they did record a new single, ‘The Flame’, for a 1996 best of.

Back in 1940, Keynote Recordings Inc. was a new, small and independent New York company with offices at 522 Fifth Ave., recently founded by Eric Bernay, the owner of a midtown Manhattan record store called The Music Room. Bernay was musically openminded and, looking for a place in the increasingly convulsed American record industry, he launched a catalog of varied music and performers.

A few of these small choral gems are well known to amateur choirs, and Poulenc's secular choral pieces are more often presented one at a time on choral albums than in the groupings in which they were originally included. Francis Poulenc: Secular Choral Music offers the composer's very first choral piece, the Chanson à boire for men's voices (1922), but most of the music here dates from either the late '30s (the Petites voix, for female or children's voices, and Sept chansons) or the World War II era (Un soir de neige), the folk-song settings entitled Chansons françaises, and the ambitious Figure humaine, whose final number, "Liberté," was dropped in sheet music form over French cities by Britain's Royal Air Force. Someone once described Poulenc as "part monk, part hooligan," and these a cappella choral works give evidence of both tendencies. The Chansons françaises are cheerful pieces with just a shade of extended harmony, almost French counterparts to Bartók's folk song settings, while the more serious pieces, such as "Un chien perdu" (A Lost Dog), from the Petites voix, have a mystical tinge that links them strongly with Poulenc's better-known sacred choral music.