CD Review: The Light Princess (Original Cast Recording)
“No… it can’t be… is it gravity | am feeling?”
It’s been a goodly time coming, just over two years since it opened actually, but the Original Cast Recording of The Light Princess is finally here. Finely crafted by writers Tori Amos and Samuel Adamson with the original cast from the National Theatre production and recorded entirely under studio conditions, this double cD a triumphant achievement. It simultaneously acts as a perfect tribute to a much-loved show (one | saw five times during its too-short run #1, #2, #3, #4, #5), it also advances the score, refining its musicality into a more intense yet accessible experience.
Right from the opening bars of the ‘Prologue: Once Upon A Time’, Katherine Rockhill’s piano playing sounds amazing and is rightfully forefronted here as the cornerstone of Amos’ wide-ranging compositions, the lushness of the strings sound pretty special too. And with Rosalie Craig’s astonishing performance as Althea – the light princess herself – liberated from the constraints of this most physically demanding of roles (both for her and for us too, goggling at the inventiveness with which her floating was essayed), her vocal interpretation deepens into something even more affecting, impossible as it may seem to anyone who saw her amazing work onstage.
While many of us loved the The Light Princess’s score from first encounter, and were excited to go back and experience it many (many…) times in the theatre, the music proved to be the most divisive element of the show, with a number of commentators bemoaning the score’s lack of “accessibility” and absence of – gah – “memorable tunes”. Frankly, such complaints never held much weight (pun intended} for those who’d truly paid attention to the show. Instead, such remarks revealed that Amos and Adamson had co-composed a musical too sophisticated and intricate for some tastes, and painfully exposed the lack of an adequate vocabulary to really discuss and explore new musical theatre writing on the part of many British theatre critics.
Such criticisms can now be silenced. With enhanced strings, a more central place for Katherine Rockhill’s terrific piano work, and lush production, the beauty, depths and detail of the music emerge as clearly as a bell on the OCR. Amos and her team have ensured that the score leaps off the speakers here: fresh, supple, shimmering, chamber-intense, always expressive of the characters’ personalities and emotional states, always a motor for the unfolding narrative.