Crossover fans have been primed and ready for this disc. With a silky-voiced and charismatic young opera star in mezzo
Denyce Graves, sultry Latin American material whose composers never worried too much about what was classical and what was popular, and first-rate jazz-sized backing groups that put the singer front and center while adding subtleties of their own, The Lost Days sounded like the album that was going to blow open a smoldering place for operatic singing on adult alternative radio.
Alas, it doesn't happen.
Graves looks great lounging on a divan with bra straps and more hanging out, and her many concert-going fans may be quite happy with The Lost Days as a memento of the
Graves aura. She delivers flawless tone and elegant phrasing on
Astor Piazzolla's vocalise Milonga sin palabras. Accompanied by Cuban jazz pianist
Chucho Valdés on Romanza de Denyce, one of several new songs composed for this project,
Graves gets into the sentimental yet artful essence of old-style Cuban pop. But that's about the best of it --
Graves barely adjusts her vocal vocabulary to match the words she's singing or the style she's singing in. She displays her low register on pianist
Eliane Elias' Haabiá-Tupi, but on a sensual piece of seduction dreaming that requires a bit of a growl of its own,
Piazzolla's Yo soy María,
Graves doesn't go for the gusto. When she sings "If the bandoneón excites me, I bite it hard on the mouth," it's not believable --
Graves doesn't step out of her ultra-smooth sound far enough to convince anyone that she means what she's singing. So it goes with
Villa-Lobos and Carlos Guastavino and
José María Vitier: with a lot of music whose rhythmic excitement ought to generate more magnetism than
Graves delivers here.