Cyrille Aimée
Move On: A Sondheim Adventure
Birdland, NYC, November 19, 2019
Reviewed by Joel Benjamin
Cyrille Aimée combines a disarming voice with sensuality and French Gypsy style. Her Move On: A Sondheim Adventure at Birdland truly took Stephen Sondheim’s songs on an adventure—along with her equally adventurous band—right in front of Sondheim, himself, who was in the front row, dead center, clearly enjoying her interpretations.
She opened counter-intuitively with “Losing My Mind” (Follies), turning it into a wistful meditation rather than a torch song. She followed it with a girlishly sweet “Love, I Hear” (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum).
“Live Alone and Like It” (Dick Tracy), Sondheim’s sardonic answer to “Being Alive,” was amusingly blasé, while “Loving You” (Passion) was gently plaintive. Her wide-eyed “I Remember” (Evening Primrose) was probably the most touching number of the evening, communicating Sondheim’s metaphoric imagery with spine-tingling delicacy.
Her bossa-nova tinged “With So Little to Be Sure Of” (Anyone Can Whistle) had a strangely blasé feel. Her closing number, “Being Alive” (Company) was, disappointingly, the only one whose arrangement was totally at cross-purposes with the lyrics. Aimée’s dreamy, samba interpretation was coolly entertaining until it became wonderfully raucous—an interesting style-over-substance failure from this terrific singer.
At one point she used an electronic
looping machine to create a many-layered ditty, layer by layer right on the
spot. The result was an exhilarating highlight.
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Cyrille Aimée is an absolute charmer. She tickled Sondheim’s songs in her unique way until they laughed, all the while twisting them to her own special effect.
