What do the works of Henry Purcell, Billy Corgan, George Frideric Handel, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Antonio Vivaldi, Chris Cornell, John Dowland, Claudio Monteverdi and Sting have in common? They are all songwriters. They lived in different cultural contexts, in different times and in different cultural environments, but their songs do not exist in isolation. Witness the new album by the Kronthaler Trio, which nine years after their debut album The Living Loving Maid (Sony Classical, 2015), based on a similar concept, has taken a new date in the spirit of obsession with songs to continue on the path they started. On the tracks of Some Call Him Johnny Grey, opera meets jazz meets musicals meets pop rock. The trio makes it clear that they are not tending a heritage, but singing songs for today, for today, songs that seem as if they have always been with us and are able to immediately captivate the listener. Each song draws its own contours and shades of colour and becomes real at the very moment: it reinvents itself and comes to life.
