|
|
 |
Maria Friedman
 Although perhaps Maria Friedman's name is known to a few in Australia, one listen to her self-titled album is enough to realise that one is in the presence of a very special talent indeed.
This recording forms the basis of the one solo show - 'By Special Arrangement' - not only for the Cabaret festival but Australia too, for that matter. Whilst here Friedman will also conduct her only Australian master class. Here is an extraordinary vocal talent who obviously relishes character roles, such is the diversity of this very fine disc.
Friedman has worked for Sondheim as well as Lloyd Webber, on Broadway, the West End and TV; a dedicated artist who has received countless award nominations as well as winning three much prized Oliviers.
She is on the phone from London where she tells me that she's been in a rush to get back in time for the interview, having dropped her boys Alfie and Toby off at school. Yet within a very short space of time it becomes apparent that she is an artist who is not only dedicated to producing her finest, but her sense of discipline is immediately apparent.
It was due to the vast terrain covered in her album (Arlen, Kate Bush, Sondheim, Brel, Rodgers & Hart) that I asked about musical influences to be told that growing up, she "never had idols. My Dad was a very famous violinist in our part of the world (the Russian/Swiss Leonard Friedman who'd not only worked with the likes of Beecham but founded the Scottish Chamber Orchestra), and I met so many famous people who didn't live up to the fantasies that you have of them..."
She continues "and people often put their humanity into their work, leaving their lives of it a little bereft of it. But the people I respect in the way that they perform were people like [Edith] Piaf. I don't want to remember her life as a drug addict and crippled with arthritis, but the heartbreaking fragility and her ability to make the lyrics count for everything, I love that."
I suggest to Friedman that the album is not just a selection of songs and that it's a series of portraits really, a point with which she is in full accord.
"Exactly. In fact that's a lovely way to describe them, Lyrics are so important to me and they've got to say something about the human condition. Opera's about grand things - love, death - whereas I prefer the minutiae, the ordinary stuff that I think shows the courage of people."
This is also the reason as to why she chooses to do Jacques Brel in English - "because it goes back to the idea of direct communication to me, I can't assume that people speak French or German and I want them to understand. I want them to go on their own journeys and I don't want the singer to get in the way. And if the lyric's good, then we're all hopefully connected by a sort of invisible thread."
Brett Allen-Bayes
Maria Friedman performs at the Cabaret Festival on Sat 7 June - one night only!
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
