Patrick Honoré writes: Some performers simply pass through a repertoire. MELISSA ERRICO inhabits it. For more than two decades, the Tony-nominated Broadway leading lady has been the English-speaking world’s most authoritative voice in the music of Michel Legrand – starring on Broadway in Amour, the short-lived adaptation of Legrand’s musical Le Passe Muraille, recording with him conducting the Brussels Philharmonic, being entrusted by lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman with debuting their final collaboration, ultimately being invited by The New York Times to write his eulogy – then appearing in France in his concert tribute at The Grand Rex. That is not a career relationship, that is a calling!
On 12 July (at midday) Errico makes a long-anticipated debut at Ronnie Scott’s, one of the world’s most exacting jazz rooms, where she brings The Summer Knows, a tribute to Legrand’s music, joined by US pianist Tedd Firth and his hand-picked quartet. The programme promises to move, as Errico always does, between French chanson and the Great American Songbook – tracing a musical dialogue between Paris and Broadway, following her sold-out appearances at Crazy Coqs and, last year, at Cadogan Hall. Errico will arrive in Soho fresh from a run of Back to Barbra at 54 Below in New York with Billy Stritch, an altogether different affair.
Opera News called her “the Maria Callas of the American musical theatre” for a voice and style that move fluidly between theatre, jazz and the Great American Songbook, and it is that fluency – across languages, genres and emotional registers – that makes this Ronnie Scott’s engagement something to look forward to.
We met to talk about Legrand, London, Streisand, and her forthcoming concert.
Michel Legrand’s music has followed you for decades, from Amour through to the Paris tribute concert at The Grand Rex (that’s where I had the pleasure of seeing you on the Paris stage for the first time, delivering a heartfelt ‘How Do You Keep the Music Playing?’) to your new show at Ronnie Scott’s. How has your relationship to his songs – emotionally, technically – changed since you first started performing them?
I’m older and more mature of course, so my understanding of the songs is, well, older and wiser. I sometimes call my Legrand shows ‘Amour & After’, referencing both the Broadway musical of his I starred in, and the general subject of the after effects of love. (In my case, three daughters!)
I still feel the pulsing, swooning quality of his music, but I try to inflect it with some more mature melancholy. ‘The Summer Knows’ is about the hottest summer you’ve ever had. (I embarrassed an orchestra once in rehearsal by insisting they understand that!) But it ends … “its time to dress for fall.” You have to articulate both emotions, heat and regret, passion and wisdom. Both are there.
Melissa Errico performing in a concert tribute to Michel Legrand at The Grand Rex, Paris
You’ll be working with Tedd Firth at Ronnie Scott’s after recording your album I Can Dream, Can’t I?with him. What does he bring to a live jazz room that’s different from a recording studio, and how do you expect this performance to evolve?
Tedd is a jazz poet, and we somehow over the years have become entangled with each other in mysterious musical ways. Our last recording together, I Can Dream, Can’t I?, was already like a live jazz room performance – we had minimal rehearsal or prep, just chose the songs and started weaving wonder together. So we trust each other for support and surprise alike. We’ll find each other as we go on.
Ronnie Scott’s is a famously intimate, demanding room for any vocalist. What are you most nervous about walking into your debut there – better known as a Broadway and New York Cabaret-style performer – and what are you most looking forward to?
The opportunity to sing at Ronnie’s is one of the great compliments of my life as a singer. I began as a Broadway, theatrical singer, doing big sings like My Fair Lady. Then over the years I evolved into a more jazz adjacent singer, a ‘girl singer’ as Stephen Sondheim put it affectionately, meaning someone who could begin with what’s on the page and then take some liberties with the music.
In the last few years I feel that I’ve become close to a true jazz singer. Not in surface style alone – I don’t do a lot of scatting or ‘vocalese’, I’m still rooted in delivering the meaning of the words that are there – but in the sense of being free in each song to find it for itself, to play and dive and reach a bit in search of the song’s best meaning. That’s jazz singing for me –what Tony Bennett or Ella did even when they were singing ‘straight’ in their songbooks – and that’s what I’ll try to bring to Ronnie’s.
You have moved fluidly between Broadway, the American Songbook and French chanson over your career. Does singing Legrand in French versus English change you as a performer – does a different part of your voice or instinct take over?
What an interesting question! I love to sing in French, and certainly when I do I feel the presence of the great French singers, from Piaf to Trenet to my friend Isabelle Georges, who is kind of my French counterpart in Legrand love. There’s a kind of unapologetic lyricism in French chanson that I love – it’s a sincere style, not at all winky or ironic, as we can be in English. I hear my grandmother singing ‘Autumn Leaves’ in French (I have a breathtaking recording of her singing it a cappella – a quiet, private tape she left behind.) It sounds more like praying. When I’m singing in French, I search for purity. Is that helpful?
You’re performing the Streisand show with Billy Stritch in some cities and a quartet in others, alongside the Legrand show with a different band entirely. How do you adjust a piece emotionally, not just musically, when the personnel around you changes?
Oh, it changes with each setting of course. Billy brings a special kind of stage smartness and sense of fun to everything we do together. My band for the Legrand show is more a strict jazz band, if you can use the word ‘strict’ about jazz. I have found jazz drummer Sebastiaan de Krom for my Ronnie’s gig in July and he was a close collaborator of Legrand – he even played Ronnie Scott’s with Legrand himself in 2015!
We sought an extraordinary guitarist Tim Rose who can swing and bring out the Brazilian colours where you see Legrand’s connection to [Antônio Carlos] Jobim. (They were good friends, and Michel called him ‘Tom’ when he mentioned him to me.) I love having a deep relationship with a single accompanist, as with Tedd, but I also love playing around with new ideas and players. I suppose I’m both monogamous and a flirt. Musically, I mean!
It’s teamwork, not me directing the band. They lend me a structure, and I climb up on it, like a kid in a playground.
Have you heard about the successful new French stage version of The Young Girls of Rochefort at the Théâtre du Lido in Paris? Would you be interested in appearing in it if it came to the West End or Broadway as a return to the legitimate stage?
I’ve heard about it but not seen or heard anything from it. Nothing could please me more than taking part!
Interestingly, that Lido production starred the young and highly talented David Marino as Maxence. He made his cabaret debut in London at Crazy Coqs in January, and he just did a wonderful Michel Legrand tribute concert at Le Bal Blomet in Paris, where you performed two years ago, using Legrand’s own musicians (Patrice Peyrieras, François Laizeau, Claude Egea and Marc-Michel Le Bévillon). Doesn’t that kind of synchronicity mean that you should eventually duet with him when you return to Paris or when he brings his Legrand show to Birdland?
I would love to duet with him, or with Isabelle again, or with my friend Marie Oppert (who also worked with Legrand in Paris; and invited me to appear on her debut album), or with so many of the musicians I’ve been lucky to play with in Paris. (Alas, Sylvain Luc…) Thierry Eliez, the French jazz pianist, meets me from time to time to prepare a Legrand concert which is now ready. We first met at Le Grand Rex for the Legrand memorial concerts and sang a duet of ‘How Do You Keep the Music Playing?’
My live shows with Laurent Valiere for 42e Rue have been thrilling – and this December, Laurent did a one-hour feature on my albums for France Musique. My friend Frederik Steenbrink, a wonderful French entertainer, was in a Paris taxi when it was playing and he video taped his taxi ride! Frederik produced those wild tap dancing and crooning nights with Isabelle, as ‘Les Deux Grand Dames’ at the Bal Blomet.
Truly, I always love singing Legrand. Two years ago I did a programme of primarily his music with the George Benson band at the Montreal Jazz Festival. It was an enormous blessing to sing at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier and to such a large audience, and speak and sing often in French. The band was, naturally, overwhelmingly cool.
The more Paris-New York dialogue there can be, the more blessed it is for all of us. Michel belonged to both traditions, to the French chanson and to American jazz, and the more we musically hybridise, the more his music remains alive.
Melissa Errico’s Broadway credits include My Fair Lady, High Society, White Christmas, Les Misérables and Amour, Michel Legrand’s only Broadway musical. She has since become one of the world’s leading interpreters of his work, performing at his sold-out memorial concerts in Paris and London.
Alongside her acclaimed recording and concert career, Errico is also a celebrated writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times. She is married to former professional tennis player and broadcaster Patrick McEnroe, making her London visit particularly timely during Wimbledon season.
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