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News
Dreams gets a rave!
by jojoknob on Jan 26, 2005
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SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THESE--
A children’s poetry competition has led to an outstanding musical recording. Gerald Haigh reports in the Times Educational Supplement, 08 October 2004
Something remarkable has happened here. Paul Austin Kelly and Richard Durrant, of Walking Oliver– producers of classy and beautifully recorded performances of songs for children– have applied their considerable talents to 15 wonderful poems by children. The poems were entered for the Walking Oliver Poetry in Song competition 2004, supported by The TES, and the result is always excellent and often truly beautiful.
For Paul and Richard, composers and performers, it’s been a challenging task. Children’s poems come in widely differing styles and those chosen, though they show genuine understanding of rhythm, are mostly too subtle to just go tum-ti-tum.
Paul and Richard, though, are well up to the task. Using a combination of live payaing and singing with a lot of clever studio work on a synthesiser, they pay respect to every poem.
As a singer, Paul Austin Kelly seems able to switch on anything from grand opera to country and western, with engaging warmth and clarity.
So, “Flying in My Head,” by seven-year-old Lucy Elizabeth Humphries, a jolly number about mentally escaping from maths, gets a bouncy tune and rhythm that eventually soars freely on a big ensemble sound:
“Chase the wind and dancing
All across the ground,
Always in my head it seems
Such joy is to be found.”
The really hard ones to set, however, were surely those in which children poured out inner feelings that sometimes seem almost too private and painful to touch. How, for example, to set about writing a tune to 10-year-old Lucie Shaw’s “Split (You’ve Fractured My Heart)”, about dad leaving the family home.
“When everything is over
You’ll be on your own.
Dad is like the gardener
Now the seeds are sown.”
Paul Austin Kelly’s response is to make the poem become, effectively, the lyric of a major number in an unwritten modern musical– shades of Sondheim, perhaps– and he sings it with the passion it deserves.
There are so many delights– “Maya and I,” 11-year-old Katie Ebner-Landy’s crazy dream about a bamboo airport, turns Paul and Richard into Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, while “The Bus that has No Sheep In,” by Laura Hoath, aged 10– a dream in more poignant mood– gets the jazz-funk treatment.
This isn’t a singalong product (although experience tells me that when children really like a song they’ll always give it a go) but it is a delight to listen to, especially with the texts to hand.
So, I guess the bottom line is---Get your copy now!
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