Sarah Brightman
La Luna

THE REVIEW

The year 2000 marked a time when the now former muse of the great Andrew Lloyd Webber, armed with her ethereal voice capable of transporting the listener to another dimension, after the pop/new age experimentation of "Eden," donned the guise of an icy snow queen to release an album with a concept and atmosphere very similar to Bjork's "Vespertine," which many, including myself, consider the pinnacle of Bjork's career. Unlike her Icelandic colleague, however, Sarah Brightman is not the type of artist who constantly seeks to incorporate daring experiments into her music at the risk of producing songs of not always brilliant quality; on the contrary: "La Luna" does not deviate a millimeter from the Classical Crossover infused with new age, so dear to the English soprano. Nothing new on the western front then, but music history teaches us that an album does not need to be innovative to be beautiful, and as a matter of fact, this album reaches truly high-quality peaks, both in the more distinctly pop pieces and in those where Brightman's classical background is more apparent.

Among the tracks of this type, "La Califfa," composed by Ennio Morricone, and the ethereal "How Fare This Spot," undoubtedly stand out, without taking anything away from "Figlio Perduto" and "Solo Con Te," based respectively on the works of Beethoven and Handel. However, where, at least in my humble opinion, Brightman gives her best is in songs more inclined to pop/new age, where her voice abandons the grandeur of opera singing to become, with impressive ease, warm, intimate, and almost whispered. This is demonstrated by splendid angelic ballads ("Scarborough Fair," "Hijo de La Luna," "She Does Not See Him"), as well as atmospheric mid-tempos ("This Love," "A White Shade of Pale"), and the curious yet successful jazz-oriented experimentation of "Gloomy Sunday." The whole is excellently arranged and produced, which significantly contributes to the album's quality, whose icy and wintry atmospheres are brilliantly recreated and perfectly tailored to Sarah's golden voice.

"La Luna" is thus a solid album worth listening to, perhaps on a winter evening while watching the snow gently wrap the world around us in a white blanket by the light of a crackling fireplace. If one must find a flaw in this otherwise excellent work, it could be the previously mentioned absence of novelty in a purely artistic-musical sense, but when an artist's work is so pleasantly enjoyable, I'd say this can easily be overlooked.