Anna Russell

Anna Russell's Encore (?)

Anna Russell (born Anna Claudia Russell-Brown), born on December 27,1911, earned herself the title of “World’s Greatest Musical Satirist” through a long and successful career on the stage (Southern). Coming from a musical background (her father was a trained musician and several of her aunts were opera singers) Anna studied music at the Kensington Royal College of Music (Oram).

Despite discouraging words from some of her teachers––she was told she had a “tin” voice and her performances in school often unintentionally produced laughter––Russell began touring with a small British opera company. Her career in opera was doomed early on through a performance of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana when she tripped on stage, tore the set down in the process, and caused the entire symphony to erupt in laughter. This event however was also the beginning of her long career as a comedian.

She worked occasionally for BBC radio before moving to Canada in 1939 (as WWII unfolded) where she enjoyed a great deal of success as a comedic lecturer and performer. Anna Russell lived in Toronto for the majority of her career with a brief stint in New York. She recorded two albums Anna Russell Sings? (that spent 48 weeks on Billboard’s top selling classical music chart) and Anna Russell Sings! Again. She also wrote two books, The Power of Being a Positive Stinker (1955) and an autobiography, I'm Not Making This Up, You Know (1985).

In Anna Russell Encore?, a compilation of live performances, Russell parodies both Verdi, the great Italian operatic composer who had done a number of Shakespearean operas, and Shakespeare when she condenses the former’s operatic adaptation of the latter’s Hamlet in her performance of Hamletto, or Prosciuttino. She condenses the epic opera down to a mere twenty-seven minutes and thirty-nine seconds, telling her listeners that the original play and opera wouldn’t have been nearly so long if Hamlet hadn’t spent so much time “hinkle pinkling around.” In a memorable line before embarking on a duet between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern she comments “now nobody’s quite sure what they do in the story but they always do it together.”

		Anna Russell images

In the liner notes Russell writes:

There are those who get very put out with me and feel that by injecting a little fun into music I am doing a disservice, but I don’t feel this is true. Every art has its attendant merriment. There are comic literature, pictures, theater, dancing––almost any art you could name. However when it comes to classical music, people all of a sudden become pretentiously solemn about the whole thing. For instance there are those who treat it as a religion or cult, the ones who go because it is smart to be seen there, and the ones (husbands) who are dragged there protesting by determined wives and are bored to death with the whole thing. Actually music is written to be enjoyed, and I don’t see why it all has to be so deadly serious.

Anna Russell was considered a talented satirist by even her strongest critics and her popularity speaks to her ability to inject some much needed humour into a genre in which it was so rarely found. She retired from the stage in 1986 and passed away on October 18, 2006 at the age of 94.

 

Ben Dugas

Works Cited:

Carruthers, Sean. "Review: The Anna Russell Album?" All Music Guide. All Media Guide. 9 Mar 2007 <http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:9ftvadskt8w8>.

Oram, Thomas. "Anna Russell Biography." All Music Guide. All Media Guide. 9 Mar 2007 <http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=41:5406~T1>.

Russell, Anna. Liner notes: Anna Russell Encore? New York: Sony, 1998.

Southern, Nathan. "Anna Russell Biography." All Movie Guide. All Media Guide. 9 Mar 2007 <http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:62191~T1>.

 

Audio Clips:

Anna Russell, Encore (?)

Sony, 1998

Hamletto, Or Prosciuttino recorded October 12-16, 1956 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

 

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