1970s: Recording and Performing Success
During this period she had two major recording successes. "You'll Answer to Me" reached the British Top 10 while Laine was 'prima donna' in the 1961 Edinburgh Festival production of Kurt Weill's opera/ballet The Seven Deadly Sins, directed and choreographed by Sir Kenneth MacMillan. In 1964 her Shakespeare and All that Jazz album with Dankworth received widespread critical acclaim.
Laine's international activities began in 1972, with a successful first tour of Australia. Shortly afterwards, her career in the United States was launched with a concert at New York's Lincoln Center, followed in 1973 by the first of many Carnegie Hall appearances. Coast-to-coast tours of the U.S. and Canada soon followed, and with them a succession of record albums and television appearances, including The Muppet Show in 1977. This led, after several nominations, to her first Grammy award, in recognition of the live recording of her 1983 Carnegie concert.
She has collaborated with many well-known classical musicians including James Galway, Nigel Kennedy, Julian Lloyd Webber and John Williams.
Other important recordings during that time were duet albums with Ray Charles (Porgy and Bess) as well as Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which won Laine a classical Grammy nomination.
Read more about this topic: Cleo Laine, 1960s
Famous quotes containing the words recording, performing and/or success:
“I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate,—and meantime it is only puss and her tail.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If success is a habit, it is a hard one to acquire.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)