Nana Mouskouri takes her Edmonton audience on a honey-sweetened trip down memory
Nana Mouskouri in concert at the Jubilee Auditorium on Wednesday, March 26, 2014. Photograph by: Larry Wong
, EDMONTON JOURNAL Review
EDMONTON - As anyone with a heart knows, it's hard to say goodbye.
Wednesday night at the Jubilee Auditorium, a beautiful 79-year-old Nana Mouskouri begged us, "I hope that you can forgive me for saying au revoir, and (yet I'm) back." The singer of dozens of albums and nearly as many languages was referring to her 2008 Farewell Tour, but nobody seemed to be interested in complaining.
The promise of reminiscing with an old friend whose work has always been steeped in unpretentious nostalgia is exactly what sold the venue out, and of the three shows that played the Jube in the last week — first ZZ Top, then Yes — Mouskouri's performance was the least dated and awkward, despite reaching back further in time. It also happily lacked strippers and yogic space goblins on a video screen — she simply opened with career concert highlights.
In her dignified sparkling black dress and trademark glasses, her take on Joni Mitchell's impossibly great Both Sides Now was followed by a heartbreaking cover of Amy Winehouse's Love Is a Losing Game. Also mentioning Whitney Houston, Mouskouri sighed of Winehouse, "It was so sad that she left so fast. I just want to remember her onstage."
Mouskouri's voice took a while to warm up, let's be honest, and never quite quaked the walls. At first, she sounded frail, quivering and tiny — yet utterly endearing — but found her energy the more she dipped into songs like La vie, l'amour, la mort and, as a tall and mysterious woman emerged from backstage for a duet, on the powerful duet Adieu Angelina.
This woman turned out to be Mouskouri's 1970-born-in-Geneva daughter, Lenou.
"I'll see you later!" Mouskouri said, handing the stage over to her offspring and five accompanying musicians, one of whom pulled out a cool melodica — one of those tiny hand pianos one blows into. Lenou's songs were straight pop, almost country, but passed the ultimate test: as my mother was the one who got me into my first "world music" through Nana, I brought her to the show. Though she's a finicky creature at times, mother was bouncing along to Lenou like a happy metronome.
The skilful players: Yannick DeBorne on guitar, Jean-Phillipe Roux playing bass, Lucien Di Napoli playing keyboards and Phillipe Pregno, on flute, percussion and sax, which he came up front and played with the singer into the break.
Returning from the encore, Mouskouri opened with the classic Try to Remember, reminiscing about her father as a projectionist in Athens, film and music giving her courage as a child.
Mouskouri's voice really started to sweeten like honey as she did a jazz medley including Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and, from her favourite film, Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
It wasn't a long night — a two-hour show with a 20-minute break — but the energy and diversity of the second set was better than the first.
After calling out someone for a small glowing screen during the show, Mouskouri and her daughter relayed the last bend with a booming Amazing Grace, then the international hit Roses Love Sunshine.
Then, the gospel-country Turn on the Sun, which the Greek singer has been inhabiting for more than 40 years, and The White Rose of Athens, which she let members of the crowd sing on a portable microphone, one by one, as if to remind us that people will be singing these songs long after she's gone, in Greek, French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Welsh, Mandarin Chinese, Corsican and Turkish and perhaps, unlike these, even languages Mouskouri never sang in.
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A tidy, pretty and fun show. Adieu, Mouskouri — until next time.
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