The story behind today’s post, which revives a post from the old “NewSounds” Blog at The Charleston Gazette, is a bit convoluted. So prepare yourself for a long-winded preface.
First of all, I want to send my condolences to the wife and family of Vic Burkhammer, a longtime news editor for The Charleston Gazette, and also an advocate for poetry, and someone who was very kind and supportive of my efforts in the early days of this blog, back when I could count on one hand the number of folks at the newspaper who understood what we were trying to do. Vic passed away on the last day of last year, and he will be missed.
A much better recollection of the life and work of Vic has been written by Douglas Imbrogno, and can be found at his WestVirginiaVille website. Doug, as longtime readers know, is the Godfather of PopCult, who hired me to write this blog and even bestowed upon it the name you all know and love. The sad event of Vic’s passing actually tipped over the first domino that resulted in this post.
Doug clued me in on the fact that, while researching his piece on Vic, he discovered that some of our earlier efforts at The GazzBlogs had been captured and preserved by The Wayback Machine at Archive.org. He found some prime examples of Vic’s poetry blog, and he discovered some vestiges of most of the other blogs.
This meant that I might possibly be able to retrieve some of the CD reviews I contributed to the NewSounds blog, which otherwise would probably have wound up in PopCult. I’ve been whining about these reviews being lost thanks to the ineptitude of Charleston Newspapers and their sad attempts at archive management since at least 2012, and I’d previously restored and reposted one of them here when I found the finished version backed up on a random hard drive.
See, originally PopCult was part of a suite of blogs at The GazzBlogs. It was a collection of blogs covering different topics. Some, like PopCult and Vic’s Mountain Word, were single-author blogs. Others, like NewSounds, had several different contributors. Aside from me, you might find CD reviews by Amy Robinson, Nick Harrah, Morgan Kelly, Bill Lynch, Michael Lipton and others.
If you had asked me, I would’ve said that I contributed five or six reviews to NewSounds. Once I dove into the Wayback Machine, I discovered that I’d actually written over 20, and those were just the ones that I was able to retrieve. There are two I know of that did not get archived there, so there might have been even more than that in total. Most of these reviews also wound up in print in The Gazz section of The Charleston Gazette (and maybe one or two showed up in the Sunday paper). Now I have them back in my hands, and I’m damned near giddy over it.
The plan is to insert my reviews into the PopCult blog, time-stamped to match the day they were posted in NewSounds, which means that these will wind up in my archives as posts from 2005 to 2008. I don’t know how quickly I will get to this. Back when I left The Gazette-Mail and took PopCult independent, I thought it would take me a year to fix broken links and restore graphics. Over four years later I’m maybe one-fourth of the way through that process. When these do get restored, I’ll include links in a new post so you can hunt them down and read them if you get bored enough to do that.
But today we’re going to re-post one of the reviews of which I was most proud. I had built my freelance career largely writing about really cool, but admittedly juvenile stuff like toys, non-sport trading cards, comic books, animation and quirky rock-and-roll. One of the things I enjoyed about NewSounds was getting the chance to broaden my reach a bit, and cover musical genres that folks might not think typical of me.
So reviewing an opera, a true opera, even though it was written by a rock star, struck a few folks as a bit of a stretch. People knew I liked goofy stuff. They didn’t realize that I also liked classical music, jazz, foreign films, philosphical tomes…the kind of stuff that would be considered to be more in the wheelhouse of folks who work at NPR, or maybe Squidward.
After this review hit print and had time for the “clip service” to get a copy to the folks in New York, I had an email from one of the folks at The Gazette. We didn’t have any contact info printed with the piece, so they wanted my permission to pass along my email address to a publicist at Sony Classical, the label that had released this record.
Of course I told them to do so, and in a few hours I had an amusingly brief email from Sony: “While, as a policy, Mr. Waters does not comment on reviews of his work, he wanted us to let you know that he appreciated what you wrote, and thank you for getting it.”
Writing reviews is generally a thankless task, so that was like manna from heaven.
Here’s the review, as originally published in NewSounds on November 28, 2005, and in The Charleston Gazette three days later…
Well Beyond Pink Floyd: Roger Waters tackles opera in “Ca Ira”
The artist: Roger Waters
The CD: “Ca Ira (There Is Hope): An Opera In Three Acts” (Sony Classical)
Anyone who has listened to “The Trial,” the finale of Pink Floyd’s classic album “The Wall,” knows that Roger Waters is capable of writing classically styled music sung by characters with distinct voices. It should come as no surprise that he has taken his music in a more intellectually challenging direction. Ca Ira tells the story of the French Revolution, and unlike many contemporary composers who merely dip their toes into classical forms, Waters dives deep into Grand Opera, and surfaces with an impressive work that has much more in common with Verdi and Rossini than it does with Philip Glass or Andrew Lloyd Webber. This is a real opera. It’s sung in English, but it’s not a glorified Broadway musical.
Ca Ira has had an elephantine gestation. Begun in 1989 to commemorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution, this work has seen the death of Waters’ collaborators, Etienne and Nadine Roda-Gil. Etienne Roda-Gil is a respected French librettist, and with his wife Nadine, he conceived the opera. Nadine provided illustrations that endowed the project with a powerful visual hook. Sadly, Nadine passed away shortly after the work began, and it sat on the shelf until 1997, when Waters began working on an English version of the text. With Etienne’s blessing, Waters fleshed out elements of the story and made it more relevant to the current political climate.
The result is a work that stands separate musically from Waters’ long-form efforts with his former band, Pink Floyd. There are the occasional hints of Waters’ previous work, but for the most part, musically, this could have been written in the first half of the nineteenth century, when opera was at its peak as an art form. This is not a “rock opera” or an overblown musical. If you aren’t used to listening to opera, it may take a while to acclimate yourself to this work. This is not a collection of catchy pop tunes, but a powerful story told with serious music. It’s unlikely that you’ll come away from Ca Ira humming any of the songs.
Lyrically, this is pure Roger Waters. The villains are the same that he’s always written about, and it’s the “bleeding hearts and the artists” who are the real heroes and hope for the future. Even in his most dark and personal works, Waters has been an optimist at heart, and the title of this opera is proof. There is hope.
The vocals are handled by a world-class cast of opera stars. Bryn Terfel lends his distinctive bass-baritone to three roles, and anchors the cast. Internationally-acclaimed soprano, Ying Huang, is superb as his counter, also assaying multiple roles and breathing life into the spirit of liberty. Paul Groves and Ismael Lo are major supporting players. I could go out on a limb and attempt to dissect the technical aspects of their performances, but I’d really be out of my depth. Essentially, they all sound really good. That’s all you need to know.
Ca Ira casts the story of the French Revolution inside a circus ring, complete with a ringmaster, clowns and acrobats retelling the tale. This adds an element of theatricality that allows a further suspension of disbelief, while acting also as a metaphor for the political circus surrounding the revolution. I was reminded of Philip DeBroca’s 1966 film King Of Hearts, where a Scottish soldier during World War One wanders into a French village entirely populated by inmates of an insane asylum. King Of Hearts employs that dramatic device to both distance the audience from the action, and then draw them into it more deeply. I felt the same way with Ca Ira.
With 38 tracks spread across two CDs, it’s hard to single out individual songs for praise. The music works in service to the story, and as such, there isn’t any single standout song. The work is so cohesive that you really have to judge it as a whole. Clocking in at nearly one hour and fifty minutes, that may seem like quite a commitment, but it’s very rewarding. The music alternates between calm exposition and stirring action, punctuated by bird sounds and cannon shots. There are come contemporary musical touches, but they’re not overbearing.
While the music is grounded in the forms as set forth by the greats of 150 years ago, there are hints of some early-twentieth century styles evident, and there are some melodies clearly consistent with Waters’ previous works. He didn’t completely subjugate his compositional voice here. He merely immersed himself in a different musical form than he’s used in the past. I’d even say he mastered that form.
I don’t think anyone is expecting this album to break out and sell millions of copies. It’s a little too deep and out of the norm for that. Fans of Pink Floyd may find it too challenging, and fans of opera may dismiss it without giving it a fair chance. This is really an exciting and rewarding work that tells a powerful and important story with wonderful music.
There are two versions of Ca Ira available. You can buy a regular two-CD set, or a deluxe SACD version that comes with a bonus 60-page booklet and a DVD with a documentary about the making of the album. The documentary is fascinating, but unless you have an SACD-ready player, you may not want to spend the extra cash. I’m hoping that a companion book of Nadine Roga-Gil’s illustrations will be published.
Now, if we could only convince Waters that the Clay Center would be a fine venue to hold a public performance of Ca Ira.
— By Rudy Panucci
UPDATE: Ca Ira is still in print from Sony Classical. You can order the SACD version from Amazon, or find it on all the major streaming services. No companion book was ever published.
The PopCulteer
As promised 
Allow me to loosely quote from the YouTube description: “This was created using footage of the West Virginia band, The Defectors, performing at The Criel Mound in South Charleston, West Virginia, in June, 1983, as a bonus for 
It’s a new year and a good time to rewrite. beef up and streamline our boilerplate for PopCult‘s weekly guide to things you can get into in and around Charleston, West Virginia. Some weeks we might stick to things in town. Most weeks we’ll go as far as Huntington and Beckley. Once in while we’ll even cross the borders into Ohio, Kentucky or Virginia.
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