Soaring to heights with Escala

There is really no way you can do it these days. I mean get away from the Michael Jackson explosion that is happening worldwide. But much as I admire Michael I did feel the need to leave all the news and music and the remembering for a while.

Escala offered that possibility. The CD is new and by a group I had never heard of that also calls itself Escala. It is made up of four beautiful girls, so I started thinking of dance music that is cute, funky and very infectious. Maybe like Spice Girls or Pussycat Dolls. But stop! I saw the song line-up and knew in an instant that there is nothing cute about cuts like Requiem For A Tower or Sarabande.

So I thought that maybe the girls in red mini dresses on the cover are classical singers and that Escala is the female counterpart of Il Divo. There is after all a Britain’s Got Talent sticker on the CD. And you know that American Idol judge Simon Cowell is also with Britain’s Got Talent and he was also the same guy who put together Il Divo, a very successful group of all-male classical singers.

I listened and found out I was wrong on most counts. Escala is an electronic string quartet discovered on Britain’s Got Talent. That means that Izzy Johnston and Victoria Lyon on violin, Chantal Leverton on viola and Tasya Hodges on cello play electronically amped up versions of classical string instruments. Think Vanessa Mae four times over or better yet, Bond, a similar girl group from the past.

The music that these acts create has a sharper edge that straddles rock then what we usually expect from string quartets. It can be jarring and is surely an acquired taste but I like the fact that it serves as an introduction to the classics for kids who would normally pass up on classical albums. And there are a lot of new takes on the familiar that they would find in the Escala CD.

Requiem For A Tower, I am not sure about the true order of things but this one was known as Lux Aeterna which was in turn based on Clint Massell’s Requiem For A Dream. It is very popular with film scorers and had been heard in the soundtracks of The Da Vinci Code, the series Lost and in its most memorable instance in The Two Towers, the second picture of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, which I guess is from where it got the new title.

Composed by Karl Jenkins, Palladio was a chart breakthrough hit for Bond. So I guess that was why Escala chose it as its contest piece for Britain’s Got Talent. Their performance was good enough to get them to the finals but street dancer George Sampson proved to be more popular with those who voted.

Kashmir is one of the great classics of rock music. Escala does an excellent job with it and the track sounds like a great single material. It was composed by Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Bonham and recorded by Led Zeppelin. I am not familiar with Finding Beauty and Children but the girls make these sound interesting that I intend to take time to find out more about them and hopefully listen to the original versions.

I am sure that everybody knows the next three cuts. Live And Let Die, the Paul McCartney theme for the James Bond movie of the same title; Chi Mai, the chartbuster from music master Ennio Morricone used in the movie The Professionals; and Feeling Good, one of the songs from the musical The Smell Of The Greasepaint that also gave birth to What Kind of Fool Am I. Michael Bublé’s is the best known version nowadays.

Then to close, there are Sarabande, the immortal Handel composition that was very popular in funerals hereabouts before mourners discovered Hindi Kita Malilimutan and What Matters Most; Clubbed To Death, a techno favorite best remembered from The Matrix movies; and Adagio For Strings, the Barbers composition used in the war film Platoon, which acquired great fame when it was used as the theme in ceremonies to commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001 bombings in the US.

And I thought I was getting away from the sad event of the past week by listening to this CD. Instead I got Adagio For Strings, Sarabande, Requiem For A Tower and other mournful stuff. Oh well, but as these girls show, you can wallow in so much melancholy and still look gorgeous. Enjoy.