Love Notes: Michele Brourman – The Pheasantry, London

Love Notes: Michele Brourman at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

There’s not much of pianist-singer-songwriter Michele Brourman but what there is is pure gold. I am no expert on pianists but if there’s anyone who plays a more educated piano, whether jazzy and thrilling or slow and heartbreaking, than this Los Angeles visitor did in her solo Love Notes show at The Pheasantry, I have not had the pleasure of hearing him or her.

As a singer, Brourman’s surprisingly strong voice is just as at home with ballads like her best-known song ‘My Favourite Year’, the self-penned ‘If You Had Let Me Love You’ and Irving Berlin’s ‘Moonshine Lullaby’ (from Annie Get Your Gun) as sharp comedy numbers such as ‘You’re Only Old Once’ and ‘Come to Mama’.

And as a songwriter she has collaborated chiefly with best friend Amanda McBroom – they provided five of 15 that made up this programme – but also her sister Robin (their naughty ‘Better From Behind’ is a cracker), Karen Gottlieb, Sally Mayes, Adryan Russ and Hillary Rollins in this new collection.

Only nine days earlier singer-songwriter Mayes – she helped Brourman write ‘And I You’ – had her own show at Crazy Coqs, while Rollins flew over especially to see McBroom do her ‘Everything Can Go’ the previous week and ‘My Daughters’ in Brourman’s show.

Usually McBroom guests on her sparring partner’s show but this year it was different. Opera mezzo Lucy Schauffer, who asked Brourman to arrange a Gordon Lightfoot protest song about the 1967 Detroit riots called ‘Black Day in July’ for a Wigmore Hall concert she was putting together last year, gave us a memorably chilling change of pace and a sharp intake of breath.

Brourman came back to finish a cerebral evening with one of the most beautiful in the McBroom/Brourman songbook ‘London in the Rain’, a eulogy to that great city that they so love.

That was gorgeous but maybe not quite as gorgeous as ‘This Far’ though I am biased. At my two daughters’ instigation, they wrote this warmly reflective song for the Chapmans’ Golden Wedding celebration last July. Wonderful to see it performed in public for the first time but please pass me a hankie!

Brourman is a bit of a secret in the UK but shouldn’t be and is well worth getting to know. Her CD The Price of Love is a good place to start. As my elder daughter Sarah said on Monday: “she is just ridiculously talented.”

Jeremy Chapman