CD Review
If It Be Your Will: Songs of Leonard Cohen (Independent)
Blue Engine String Quartet, Paul Simons piano, Cliff LeJeune vocals
August 2005
Response from Leonard Cohen to If It Be Your Will . . .
"If it be Your Will
To Cliff Le Jeune
Paul Simons
and the Blue Engine String Quartet
Dear Colleagues
Thank you for this
sublime gift
Leonard Cohen."
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Stephen Pedersen, Arts Reporter, The Halifax Herald Limited
If ever any one other than Leonard Cohen was meant to sing his songs, it has to
be Cliff LeJeune. He's lived with them for 15 years, and by now, listening to
him sing them on If It Be Your Will, it is apparent that they have settled in to
his artistic psyche where they have matured and undergone acute distillation.
LeJeune will not describe himself as a singer. He's an actor who sings, he
insists, and that, to judge by this fine collection of 15 Cohen songs recorded
with Blue Engine String Quartet and pianist Paul Simons, gives us Cohen's words
with an actor's crystalline diction and an interpretative emphasis that makes
them all the more moving.
Cohen's own recorded interpretations are flat, monotonous even, gaining their
extraordinary power from the sheer brilliance of the poetry, of Cohen's
compassion and of his instinct for telling phrases and striking images - like
that of Joan of Arc entering the fire that consumes her like a lover. LeJeune's
interpretations are anything but flat. He commits himself to a fiercely
projected melancholy. He captures attention.
The arrangements, written by Symphony Nova Scotia bassoonist Chris Palmer are
careful not to get in the way of either Cohen or LeJeune. They are transparent,
and the playing, by Blue Engine and Simons is exquisitely expressive. They
respond with the artist's instinct for seizing the moment, letting it all hang
out for a note or two or a telling a phrase, then seamlessly settling into the
background.
The 15 songs include Famous Blue Raincoat, Suzanne, The Law, Song of Bernadette,
Story of Isaac, Paper Thin Hotel, Everybody Knows, Tower of Song and the title
track, last of the set, If It Be Your Will.
It's a disc to sit down with when the house is quiet and the images can play
like flame in the fireplace.
LeJeune brings Cohen out of Blue Engine
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Stephen Pedersen, Arts Reporter, The Halifax Herald Limited
If anyone could be said to "own" the Leonard Cohen Songbook, it would have to be
Halifax actor-singer Cliff LeJeune. He's been singing those oddly electrifying
songs on stages across the country for 15 years.
And now, although he says the thought of having a CD out there terrifies him, he
has recorded 15 of them with the Blue Engine String Quartet (violinists Jennifer
Jones and Anne Simons, violist Margot Aldrich, cellist Hilary Brown) and pianist
Paul Simons. The CD, produced by CAC Maritimes, is called If It Be Your Will and
it is being launched Friday night in Soho Kitchen starting at 8:30 p.m.
"I've been a bit of a basket case the last few days," LeJeune said over coffee
Wednesday morning. "I think I'm more nervous about Friday night than at any time
in the process. It's the whole idea of having recorded them and put them down."
LeJeune is an intense performer. Over the 15 years since he and director Bryden
MacDonald put the first of three Cohen/LeJeune collaborations together for the
Stephenville Festival, he has seen the songs grow from being merely relevant to
being strangely definitive.
"What struck me from the beginning," he said, "was the way people have
responded. It's always been so huge and so generous, and it doesn't matter
whether it's done in costume (as in Sincerely) or in T-shirt and jeans (as in
the Avalanche version he did for late night cabaret at the Festival Antigonish)."
It was the images in the poetry that first caught LeJeune's attention, images
like Joan of Arc going to the stake as though the fire was her lover (Joan of
Arc).
"I see images of my life in the songs. Otherwise I wouldn't be singing them. I
like to sing with my mind going through those images - for me the images are
like a loaded gun. Then I discovered that Cohen's melodies are (also)
incredible."
"I've worked in musical theatre where opera singers coach the cast and when I
complained that I could't understand what they were saying, they said the words
weren't important. But for me the way I build a song has as much to do with the
lyrics as with the melody. With Cohen it feels like a hand in a glove."
People have walked out of the Cohen shows, especially Sincerely a Friend,
because they found the lyrics too racy in a song like Paper Thin Hotel, where
the poet speaks of hearing his lover making love to another man in the next room
and discovers that he is not jealous, despite the pain.
But what attracts LeJeune is what he calls "the combination of human aspects of
life dispersed among religious references as in Paper Thin Hotel and Joan ofArc
or Song of Bernadette."
LeJeune's collaboration with Blue Engine String quartet began when they
suggested a concert in 2000. The quartet, all of whom play in Symphony Nova
Scotia, wanted their SNS colleague Chris Palmer, who plays second bassoon, to
arrange the songs. Money from the old Nova Scotia Arts Council was obtained for
the arrangements, so Palmer and LeJeune set to work.
"I don't think the quartet was expecting the overwhelming response we got. But
it's been that way everywhere, even in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre (as
part of 2003's Atlantic Scene)," LeJeune said.
LeJeune moved to Toronto in 2000 in order to find work. But it has been a
hand-to-mouth existence. He's recently done Pelagie, and Tomfoolery and Beauty
And The Beast, and in April/May he has work in Sudbury.
It has been thin pickings, Le Jeune says. "I'm almost living on the street--no
fixed address. I have no idea what I will be doing in the fall."
But this Friday, he knows what he will be doing. And despite his nervousness at
the concept of a CD, he's also really excited. "I never, not in all my 48 years,
thought that I would make a recording," he said.
"I received this CD on Saturday. It is sublime. There is an interpretive drama that this CD's musicians and the phenomenal singer does to Cohen's music and words that puts it at the top of my 'covers' list. Those involved in the making of this CD and Leonard himself should be very proud of the result. You should get this CD!"
- Anonymous, Alaska, USA