March 2008

Barbara Cook

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Cabaret singer extraordinaire, 80-year old Barbara Cook who opens on Tuesday, March 4th at Café Carlyle tells “Mad About Music” host Gilbert Kaplan that you have to strip when you go on stage – take off your emotional clothing. "I pour my life's blood into a song--every hurt, every wonderful thing," she reveals. Ms. Cook explains that's why she doesn't sing Cole Porter's songs: "There is a kind of sophistication and wittiness about them that does not fit my sensibility."

But long before the passion for cabaret songs, it was the magic of classical music that embraced her: "I must have been a very mooney, dreamy teenager, she recounts," I would lie on the floor, and I had a little victrola and candles and I would play music hours on end." Her first musical memory is Grieg's Piano Concerto. Today her favorite conductors are Valery Gergiev and the hot 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel. Composers whose music she picks to play on the show include Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff. Asked about her fantasies, Cook reveals that she would love to be a dramatic opera singer performing Tosca at the MET or to be a painter: "I love art just about as much as I do music.”