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Stories   >   Stacey Kent - The Changing Lights / Huffington Post review

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Stacey Kent - The Changing Lights / Huffington Post review

Posted: June 5, 2014

Stacey Kent, The Changing Lights (Warner Bros): Kent's voice might be called light, but perhaps it's more accurate to describe it as fragile, emotionally fragile. That's often true of the 15 songs she includes. At times in the past, particularly when she started, Kent was piquant, not to say perky. That's less the situation now. The shift may have to do with the Brazilian music she favors and has mastered to such an extent that composers in that country rank her with the best of their home-grown singers. Take, for instance, Vinicius de Moraes's "How Insensitive" and its devastating Norman Gimbel lyrics. Behind Kent's floating notes is the anguish of love gone wrong simply because that's how it goes all too often. The evanescence of love, of romance is a recurrent theme for Kent. It's definitely the motivating factor behind two songs, "The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain" and the title tune, which are both written by Kent's saxophonist-producer-arranger husband Jim Tomlinson and the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. The Tomlinson-Ishiguro team, who've taken to writing regularly for Kent, is formidable. Almost everything they offer has the melancholy feeling of love that's not everlasting but neverlasting. (What a contrast to the noticeably happy Kent-Tomlinson marriage!) Tomlinson's arrangements are always nuanced and unhurried. They're the perfect match for Kent's enormous talents.