Youthful Journey

Posted on September 27, 2011

by Benjamin Pomerance

For nearly 30 years now, the Young@Heart chorus has been defying people who try to pin labels on what they are. So let’s start off with what they are not.

They are not a gimmick. They are not just a cute idea. On stage at the Flynn on Saturday night, director Bob Cilman and his merry gang of 30-plus senior citizen singers — ranging in age from 73 to 89 — proved that they are, above all else, a viable performing ensemble. Their standards of musicality are, at the risk of making this an exercise in hyperbole, quite fantastic. Their voices are strong. Their interpretations are crisp. Their ability to hold an audience in the palm of their hand were evident from the first note to the last, with the nearly-capacity crowd starting to hoot and holler midway through the chorus’s first song, a terrific rendition of The Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

 They are not old people trying to be young people. Yes, the group sings music by rock artists of more contemporary generations. Yet they do not necessarily sing rock music like the artists of contemporary generations. Instead, they head out on stage in their matching outfits, backed by a seven-piece band that produced some first-rate solos over the course of this evening, and confidently sing the songs their own way.

Their performance of Sonic Youth’s Schizophrenia, for instance, didn’t sound very much like the band’s original in-your-face rendition — which was great, because it gave a brand-new sense of the song’s musicality and meaning. (For whatever it’s worth, Sonic Youth likes the chorus’s interpretation, too, as the band has featured Young@Heart’s rendition on their website). In general, Young@ Heart’s presentations of these rock songs tend to involve significantly better diction than the original versions, which is often a blessing. After hearing some of these songs (Talking Heads’ Road To Nowhere comes to mind) performed in muffled, slurring rock-speak for so long, actually being able to pick out the words clearly was a blessing and allowed the message of the songs to come through.

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