#jennifer aborn

[jamesrodayrodriguezpresents]

Jennifer Aborn’s Insta Story

[allmymusic]

46 My native land

I think I probably bought this disc after seeing Larmore’s picture in a magazine in the late 1990s; it has taken the selection of songs on this disc nearly twenty years to really appreciate themselves in my ears.

This original cover is super 1990s; it even uses the same font as the Gilmore Girls title sequence couple years after this disc was released. There are also whimsical pictures of top hats and pumpkins and whatnot.

So, yeah, I bought this disc because I thought the singer was pretty. This wasn’t the picture that prompted the purchase, but damn she’s good-looking.

It took some time for me to really get into the 20th century American song, but listening to this now, there isn’t a song here that I don’t like. I also like Larmore’s voice; it isn’t evenly beautiful, but it is exciting to listen to. She does have a tendency to ham it a bit too much at times though, making some songs hard listening. Based on this album, and on a quick youtube search, I can’t quite pin her down though - there’s Rossini, there’s Handel, there’ Verdi, there’s Carmen, and I don’t quite get the sense of what her main thing at her prime was. She may have been the Sam Neill of mezzos - you know, the one who appeared in some big whopping things, with some big whopping names, but never quite was the star.

This album mostly works though; the selection of songs is pretty good, there’s a good mix of well-known and obscure. Because of the weird way how the composers’ birth year is marked on the booklet, it took me a while to catch on that some of them would have still been very much alive at the time of the recording, making the inclusio of their work particularly interesting. The booklet has the texts of only few of the songs on the album, and the introduction is sparse; the winsome design doesn’t quite make up for the lack of content here.

Favourite tracks: I love many of these songs, but I’m going to pick the three songs by Lora Aborn (20-22) as my favourites. They definitely deserve more attention.

My native land - A collection of American songs Jennifer Larmore, mezzo Antoine Palloc, piano

Available on Spotify under the title “American Songs”.