Maureen McGovern

Maureen McGovern, two-time Grammy nominee and recent Grammy winner for her participation in SONGS FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD: THE MUSIC OF MISTER ROGERS, is a celebrated recording artist, theater and concert performer. In addition to her Oscar Winning gold records, THE MORNING AFTER and WE MAY NEVER LOVE LIKE THIS AGAIN, Maureen's other pop classics include CAN YOU READ MY MIND? and DIFFERENT WORLDS and her newest 60's anthology CD, A LONG AND WINDING ROAD. With over 25 recordings, including critically-acclaimed tributes to George Gershwin, Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Harold Arlen, she has performed throughout the world, frequently celebrating these composers. Maureen continues to be a favorite with virtually every POPS Orchestra, often featured on PBS Specials.

Fresh from her Drama Desk Award nominated role as Marmee in the Broadway production and 1st National Tour of LITTLE WOMEN, Maureen's other starring roles on Broadway include THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE, NINE and 3 PENNY OPERA, as well as the Broadway National Tour of THE KING AND I.

Available for this season: A Long and Winding Road: The Concert celebrates her love affair with the works of Jimmy Webb, Carole King, Bob Dylan, Randy Newman and such classic songs as "The Circle Game," "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?," "Imagine," "Fire and Rain" and many others. These songs, as The New York Times noted, have become "the second half of the Great American Songbook." They're classic, timeless and evoke all kinds of memories.

"A captivating musical scrapbook from the 1960's to the early '70's. Ms. McGovern is blessed with a vocal technique second to none." - The New York Times

Symphony charts available.

MUSIC REVIEW: Exploring Folk and Soft Rock and Discovering Pop Standards
By STEPHEN HOLDEN, The New York Times, February 16, 2008

Unfailingly demure, stalwartly upbeat and blessed with a vocal technique second to none, Maureen McGovern might be described as the Julie Andrews of the Love Generation. Because she has devoted most of the last 25 years to a pop-jazz, Broadway and light classical repertory, I hadn’t thought of her quite that way until her captivating new show, “A Long and Winding Road,” at the Metropolitan Room.

In the program, which plays irregularly through Feb. 23, she applies the pop-standard test to rock-era songs. The ones she has chosen — by Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Jimmy Webb and others — pass with honors.

In that exam Ms. McGovern and her musical director and pianist, Jeff Harris (with Jay Leonhart on bass), transform astutely selected folk and soft-rock songs, many composed on guitar, into more formal, piano-based pieces performed with a recitalist’s discipline and precision. Ms. McGovern has perfect intonation, impeccable enunciation and the dynamic control and the vocal flexibility of a classical lieder singer.

Her vocal texture, with its softened vibrato and nasality at the upper end suggests a folk-jazz Barbra Streisand with an extra octave. The style she uses about half the time is unaffected, pure folk-pop crooning, sometimes a cappella.

This chronologically nonlinear musical scrapbook of baby boom music, from the 1960s to the early ’70s, begins with a fragment of Joni Mitchell’s “All I Want” attached to Paul Simon’s “America” and ends with a verse of Ms. Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” leading to John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

There is soft-edged humor. Amusing bits include “ ’60s Silly Syllables,” a skillfully executed medley of nonsensical doo-wop intros, and Tom Lehrer’s blasphemous “Vatican Rag,” offered as a response to what Ms. McGovern on Thursday called her “1950s and ’60s Catholic girl experience.” Parodying Connie Francis singing “Where the Boys Are,” she captured Ms. Francis’s overbearing whine while lending the song twice the vocal heft than Ms. Francis ever put into it.

Although nothing rates below a B, most of the songs that get A+’s are those originally composed on piano, especially those by the still under-regarded Jimmy Webb. The exquisite gentleness with which she renders “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” makes its characters in a song he wrote as a teenager sound painfully young and vulnerable. Performing “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” Ms. McGovern holds back until the emotional dam bursts, and she briefly lets the torrents rage before reining the song back in.

Ms. McGovern brings her jazz know-how to Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die” and unleashes glimpses of a full-tilt ferocity that suggests that there is a drowsy tiger stirring inside this nice Catholic schoolgirl from Youngstown, Ohio. It is more than she has ever shown before.