Talk:Welcome To The Voice

Anyone else know anything more about this? ~krueger

I'd never heard of it before I saw the article you made, but I just searched googled, and found this snippet of an article about it. It's some guy interviewing Steve Nieve ([1]).

Andrew Ford: What about the opera, 'Welcome to the Voice'?

Steve Nieve: Right. Well in order to seduce Mu-Mu, I made a tape of me playing the piano and saying: well this is the theme of the man, and this is the theme of the woman, and this is ....etc. And can we work on this opera together? And that was how we got together, and we spent the first part of our relationship working on that. And it's called 'Welcome to the Voice'.

We managed to produce a version of it live in New York, and I got Elvis to sing the lead role in it. Ron Sexmith is another man who's got a voice that I really love. He played a part in it. We had the singer from 'They Might be Giants', that's a New York band. The music is a string quartet, so I was honoured to have the Brodsky Quartet, and the other part of the orchestra is a piano and a saxophonist with no music. You have to somehow play with the string quartet. And we did one performance in New York of it.

Andrew Ford: Staged?

Steve Nieve: Yes, at the Town Hall Theatre.

Andrew Ford: So were Elvis and Ron Sexmith required to act?

Steve Nieve: They weren't required to act in the conventional sense. What was great was that I thought Ron Sexmith really fulfilled his part in such a brilliant way, but not through acting. It was just so genuine. Everyone that was involved, you know. There's not a great deal of acting in it. It's mainly people singing about their experience of voices.

Andrew Ford: Well when you've got voices that are as expressive as Elvis' and Ron Sexsmith's that's what classical opera is about anyway; people do most of the acting with their voices, don't they?

Steve Nieve: Yes, that's it.

And by the way, I think it's really cool that Flans was involved in this. Sounds neat. ~ magbatz

It is cool, I also found a supposed Webcast archive of part of it on Elvis Costello's website, but haven't tried it yet. krueger