169 words, 1 minute read time.
The French chanteuse and the Belgian singer Jacques Brel both lived sad, chaotic lives. The only real love of Piaf’s life died in a plane crash. Brel was a heel. He abandoned his wife and family. Both died before they were fifty. Yet they each produced some of the world’s greatest music.
Age differences meant that they could never have sung on the same stage. Melanie Gall – who hales from Alberta in Canada – imagines a concert of some of their best songs and makes a magnificent job of it. Milord, Non, je ne regrette rien, from Piaf, and Ne me quite pas, Amsterdam from Brel. She also brings back to life some of the artists’ lesser-known songs.
Melanie admits she looks nothing like Piaf – or Brel – but with an infectious mixture of awe for their musical genius and good humour in telling their stories, she holds the intimately small audience in the palm of her hand. It’s wonderful stuff.
Reviewed by David Kerr
More information on, and tickets for Piaf and Brel: the Impossible Concert can be found here
Edith Piaf (1915-63) and Jacques Brel (1929-78), were nearly fifteen years apart in age. Their classbackgrounds were very different. Piaf born in poverty and brought up in a brothel. Brel the son of a bourgeois owner of a cardboard box factory. Both escaped into music in different ways. Brel from a job in his fathers factory and Piaf from the grind of poverty. They never met but here Melanie Gall brings there songs together.