Paul McCartney - Ecce Cor Meum

Not as out of his depth as you’d imagine

Since 1991’s Liverpool Oratorio with Carl Davis, the ex-Beatle has made further valiant attempts to reinvent himself as a kind of nuclear age Sir Arthur Sullivan. Yet, as a catalyst in the breaching of the abyss between pop and “cutting edge” classical, he needs to accept that he will always remain a novice in comparison to the disparate likes of Scott Walker, whose most recent albums have betrayed the atonal influences of Schoenberg, Bartók and Penderecki, and Frank Zappa, who negotiated a complete recovery as a serious composer before his death in 1993.

You might hear Ecce Cor Meum (“behold my heart”) during a future season at the Royal Albert Hall, where a performance of this oratorio, dedicated to the first Lady McCartney, was filmed in 2006. It went down a foreseeable storm with the standing-room-only audience, and much of its sense of occasion comes across on a DVD supplemented with a documentary about its creation. Moreover, if Ecce Cor Meum has less to do with the atonal extremities of Schoenberg and than Miklos Rozsa’s easy-on-the-ear soundtracks to Ben Hur and El Cid, it has a reposeful daintiness that’s just, well, nice.

EMI Classics | 50999 5 00733 99

Reviewed by Alan Clayson
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