Singer Maureen McGovern Joins Syracuse Symphony Orchestra For Pops Series Concerts
Singer Maureen McGovern Joins Syracuse Symphony Orchestra For Pops Series Concerts
by Melinda Johnson (Syracuse.com)
Syracuse, NY -- Everyone should have the pleasure of speaking to Maureen McGovern when harried. The songstress’s honeyed voice lowers the stress level during a phone interview on St. Patrick’s Day.
Central New Yorkers can hear that voice when McGovern performs Friday and Saturday in the M&T Bank Pops Series of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra.
The concert will include the songs that led up to her recording of “The Morning After” from the movie “The Poseidon Adventure,” and her nomination for a 1973 Grammy Award. In her early days, first as a folk singer, McGovern sang the lyrics of Carole King, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Jimmy Webb, among others. Selections from these songwriters are featured on her recent CD, “A Long and Winding Road.”
McGovern has performed their songs (“The Times They Are a-Changin’,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”) in intimate theaters in a one-woman show. Now, her longtime collaborator Jeff Harris has arranged them for orchestra concerts.
“In rehearsing these (songs) and finding our new arrangements, our new takes on these songs, I would often break down in tears,” she says from Columbus, Ohio, one of her two homes. “I mean because the writing is so rich with these particular singers, songwriters.”
With an orchestra, the show is transformed. “It just about blows the roof off the whole building,” she says. “It’s thrilling.”
As someone who is “proud to be 60” and singing, McGovern didn’t want to stage a boomer or party show. “I was looking for a more introspective point of view.”
The singer’s ambition has been to give the songwriters of the’60s the same loving respect as for those of the Great American Songbook — Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Arlen.
“I think there’s just a greater appreciation of looking back at the’60s and these particular writers, who have an entire canon of music that they’ve left behind and continue to write.”
McGovern’s concert also will cover more of her musical bases, including some Broadway tunes. McGovern appeared on Broadway in “Little Women” as Marmee and in “The Pirates of Penzance,” replacing Linda Ronstadt. She was the singing nun, singing “Respect,” in the “Airplane!” movies.
In passing, McGovern refers to herself as the “disaster-theme queen.”
Huh?
She ticks off the string of songs she sang that were attached to disaster films: “The Morning After”; “We May Never Love Like This Again” (“The Towering Inferno”); and “Wherever Loves Takes Me” (“Gold”).
That was one part of her past. McGovern is focused another place in time, the songs of the 1960s and’70s. She will take SSO concertgoers along for the ride. (3/24/2010)
