by Patrick Honoré
The Summer Knows was performed by Melissa Errico at Ronnie Scott’s, London.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
There is a moment in any great concert when the room stops being just a room, when the walls of the venue – the sight lines, the drinks orders, the ambient clatter – all dissolve, and what remains is only the voice and what the soul behind it conveys. That moment arrived on a Sunday afternoon at the legendary Ronnie Scott’s temple of jazz in London, where something different happened – not pure jazz, not strictly musical theatre, not just a concert tribute, but all three together.
Melissa Errico – who had previously sung the Michel Legrand songbook at Crazy Coqs – opened her debut concert at Scott’s with ‘I Was Born in Love With You’, Legrand’s haunting theme from the 1970 Wuthering Heights, and the choice was immediately revealing.
This was not a singer arriving with greatest hits. This was a singer arriving with a map – one that would take the audience from the moors of a forgotten British costume film to the streets of post-war Paris to the concert halls of Broadway, and back again, all in the span of two generous 45-minute sets.
The band – Tedd Firth at the piano, Tim Rose on guitar, Oli Hayhurst on bass, Sebastiaan de Krom (who had the privilege of playing with Legrand in his last London concert) on the drums – gave the music a warmth and architecture it might not have found in a more reverential setting.
Ronnie Scott’s is not a concert hall; it doesn’t flatter singers who treat it like one. Errico treated it like a living room: intimate, digressive, funny and occasionally heartbreaking. Firth, her longstanding musical collaborator from New York, seemed to anticipate every phrase before she arrived at it, a rapport audible in the breathing space around each note.
The first act moved with real intelligence through Legrand’s range. ‘Something New in My Life’ from Micki + Maude (1984), is not a song most audiences know, and that was the point: Errico is not interested in reassurance.
She followed it with ‘I Will Wait for You’, the great English-language adaptation of Legrand and Jacques Demy’s theme from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and then ‘You Must Believe in Spring’ – originally ‘La Chanson de Maxence’ from The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), with the Bergmans’ English lyric – delivered with a stillness that seemed to stop the clock entirely.
‘Other People’s Stories’ from Amour (2002) brought the house into Errico’s own history with Legrand. She told the room the story behind the song: that Legrand wrote it for her overnight during previews, that it was in the show by seven o’clock the same evening, that she sang it from a page taped into a magazine prop because there had been no time to memorise it.
That song, with Jeremy Sams’ lyrics, was beautiful then; it still is today, even if Amour – adapted from Legrand’s French musical Le Passe-Muraille (1997) starring Errico’s stage and life acolyte Isabelle Georges – didn’t fare too well on Broadway in 2002. It also went mostly unnoticed at the Charing Cross Theatre in 2019, just after Legrand passed away, thus sadly missing the opportunity to see it in London, which would have immensely pleased him.
‘Hurry Home’, introduced in the 2013 film Max Rose and premiered at Cannes with Jerry Lewis, arrived as a surprise – more jazz than torch song, propelled by Firth’s piano into something altogether livelier than its elegiac reputation might suggest.
The act closed with ‘The Way He Makes Me Feel’ from Yentl, arguably Legrand’s masterpiece and a labour of love for his friend Barbra Streisand, who made another right choice when trusting him to write it.
‘How Do You Keep the Music Playing?’ from Best Friends (1982) was one of Legrand’s most popular compositions in America, even if lesser known in France. It strikes a perfect tension between optimism and dread and Errico sang as it if she had written it herself. No wonder she chose to sing it at Legrand’s unforgettable tribute concert at Le Grand Rex in Paris in April 2019.
The second act opened with ‘Watch What Happens’ – the English adaptation of ‘Récit de Cassard’ from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – followed by ‘His Eyes Arise’ from Legrand’s unproduced musical adaptation of The Thomas Crown Affair (2002), the moving ‘Little Boy Lost’ from Pieces of Dreams (1970) and ‘Dis-moi’ from the movie The Happy Ending (1969) — with French lyrics by famous novelist Françoise Sagan.
There were also a few last rarities: ‘Maybe Someone Dreamed Us’, first recorded by Errico herself, ‘Martina’ – a deeply personal song written for Legrand’s daughter, and ‘I Haven’t Thought of This in Quite a While’, the final collaboration between Legrand and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, introduced by Errico on her Legrand Affair Deluxe Edition (2019).
The rapturous evening concluded with much more familiar material: ‘Once Upon a Summertime’ (1964) with original lyrics by Eddy Marnay and English lyrics by Johnny Mercer, ‘The Summer Knows’ theme from Summer of ’42, whose score won Legrand the Academy Award in 1971, and ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’, perhaps Legrand’s most famous song, an Oscar winner for Best Original Song (The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968) which Sting tackled in 1999.
The encore was the haunting: ‘What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life’ (Happy Ending), my particular favourite, made famous by Streisand, but also recorded by jazz legends such as Sarah Vaughan – so a fitting farewell for Ronnie Scott’s.
Legrand’s music is not modest or easy; it asks singers to inhabit feeling at full scale – to really mean it, or not at all. What Errico brings, and what this evening confirmed beyond a doubt, is exactly that: the willingness to mean it completely, in a room not always accustomed to that material, but a sold-out room nonetheless.