Sharon Azrieli: Tribute to Michel Legrand

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Versatile musical prodigy Sharon Azrieli has enjoyed a distinguished and far-flung career as an operatic soprano, Broadway and pop song stylist, and even synagogue cantor (Montreal’s first woman in such a role). Now, Azrieli has made what she calls “a deep dive” into the copious oeuvre of the late, legendary film and jazz composer Michel Legrand with her album Secret Places – a Tribute to Michel Legrand.

The collection features 14 lavishly orchestrated and lovingly delivered performances of songs by the prolific French composer—some well-known, some cannily culled from obscurity by Azrieli’s determined research efforts—comprising a panoptic view of the windmills of Legrand’s busy and ingenious musical mind.

And on April 11, in concert with the Orchestre classique de Montréal and with orchestrations by acclaimed Newfoundland-born composer and arranger Jonathan Monro, Azrieli will perform a wide-ranging selection from the Legrand catalogue as the featured second half of a full program entitled “Kaleidoscope.” The evening will also mark premières of works by composers Robert Rival and Barbara Assiginaak.

“What I love very much about his music,” Azrieli says of Legrand, “is that there’s a real affinity with Jewish music—those minor seconds and those minor modes.”

Indeed, while not Jewish, Legrand was raised by a mother of Armenian heritage who may in large part have been responsible for fostering in Legrand an appreciation for the rich, plaintive sonorities of much Middle Eastern music—a sensibility well borne out by Legrand’s score for Barbra Streisand’s 1983 blockbuster film Yentl.

“When I had done my first album of Broadway music,” says Azrieli, “I had fallen in love with a few of (Legrand’s) songs, one of which was ‘Papa, Can you Hear Me?’” (from Yentl).

“I found that there were actually very few Michel Legrand albums,” Azrieli says, and thus was born her determination to fill the void—a determination aided by her fortuitous meet-up, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Israeli-American jazz pianist and orchestral arranger Tamir Hendelman, who shared Azrieli’s affection for Legrand and her idea for a tribute album. “I was very honoured that he took on the project,” Azrieli says.

The resulting album, Secret Places, takes its title from a piece of Legrand music which, at first assay, did not seem to have lyrics. “I could only find it done as an instrumental,” says Azrieli, “which makes sense because it’s an incredibly difficult vocal.” Yet, on the album, she belies any such difficulty with a quicksilver and fleet vocal line that glides effortlessly over Hendelman’s rich arrangement, which pops with snappy jazz energy.