I attended the concert on both nights.
First, there is the issue of subjectivity. If a band elects to play ABBA material, or B & B material, they are already on the right track, and I would require them to mangle it pretty badly in order to hold it against them.
Second, I have never seen a live performance by a tribute band. I never saw ABBA, live. I have 4 versions of The Movie, and have watched it, the 1979 tour video, and the usual videos more times than I can count. So I some idea of the look of a real ABBA performance, but not of the pressure of the sound, or the edifice of excitement that was projected.
Third, I attended the first concert with this trepidation: that this might boil down to an orchestral evening rather than a rock concert, in the nature of "Hollywood Strings Does ABBA." When this did not prove true, you can imagine my relief and excitement. That has to color my reactions.
The concert took my breath away. The concert made me cry. The concert made me thankful for Helen Sjoholm and the others. The concert proved that Agnetha and Frida embodied ABBA so uniquely, that no fund of current talent can duplicate the experience.
Also on the floor for the Saturday concert was Stephen Humphries, from New Zealand. We had opportunity to sit down and process some of the experience late on Saturday night. His base of accurate ABBA information is deeper than mine. The following are some of his observations:
The stage was serviced by a number of teleprompters, spaced about every 25 feet along the width. Karin, Tommy and Anders all spent quite a bit of time gazing into these screens, although these moves were sometimes thinly disguised. Helen, on the other hand, seemed only rarely to have to look down. I'd say she was a fan; I'd say she knows the lyrics, just like most of you do.
I don't know if this is business of having teleprompters for lyrics is now de riguer for rock acts, but the few concerts that I've attended in the past few years didn't have them. Is it fair to raise this point? This material is not, after all, their own (except for a few signature songs, e.g. Mio min Mio, Du Maste Finas, etc.). I noticed that Anders looked to the teleprompters during One Night in Bangkok, which somehow surprised me. On the ABBAmail list, there have been discussions of flubs. Well, maybe teleprompters would have helped the girls too, in their day, if available. BTW, only two flubs that I caught: Karin and Helen sang one different word during a power duet (I don't remember which one), and the foursome had one ragged ending, boys quitting before girls. This covers both nights.
Karin Glenmark's voice has always been impressive, and remains so. On the first night, I thought she was a bit tentative, both with regards to her grasp of the lyrics and in what she did with them. Twenty four hours (and the Saturday afternoon concert) later, there was already a change. She found some additional harmony lines to project for Helen, and seemed generally to take her vocals higher.
There is the issue of who is going to sing the sterling, high chroma Agnetha leads and harmony parts. In these performances, several different strategies were used. The most striking was having Tommy Korberg sing lead on The Winner Takes it All. This prevents comparison. In the same vein, Anders gave it a go with SOS. Thrilled to hear these songs performed at all, I nonetheless was crying on the inside for the absence of the true voice. I believe Karin Glenmark is, in her range and timbre, most able to approximate Agnetha, but this was not much tried on Friday night, and only embryonicly on Saturday during the final act.
In his studio albums, Anders Glenmark has demonstrated three voices, or ranges. The lowest is nicely textured and very comfortable to my ear. I am not acute enough in my listening, or my musical knowledge, to know how many notes he can span in this voice. The second, which is the most common "voice" I hear on his albums, is thinner, less resonant, and capable of conveying high emotion. The third is a falsetto. When Anders took on Pity the Child, he sang from his middle range and quickly ran out of notes. I hadn't thought about it the hundreds of times I have heard Murray Head sing it on my Chess recording, but this is a very, very demanding song. B&B have composed a real test. Anders was game, he seemed fully invested in it, he could sell the pain of it, but he was overmatched.
At the Friday night (first) performance, the encores were: Dancing Queen; Thank You for the Music; Thank You for the Music (a la Doris Day version, with Tommy Körberg singing plaintively). In the Saturday night show, the second encore opened with Tommy doing his Doris Day/comedy approach, and this was blended into the regular presentation of the song, constituting a unified single encore.
I know that some have called them stiff, but as an ordinary, heterosexual male my own opinion is that Agnetha and Frida were most often damn sexy on stage. And because ABBA featured two gorgeous lead singers, performing as equals, each a worthy icon, the sexualized moves were often quite unique and oh so intriguing. Especially when it involved moves the girls were directing at each other. [Thus the rumors about their sexual orientations.] Can this ever be duplicated? While performing Waterloo, Karin and Helen showed us some of those special, two-girl moves. This was, I believe, the only such attempt; other embraces, slides, touches, were between Helen and Anders, or Karin and Tommy. Hats off to them for trying. But, to answer my own question: No. Apparently it cannot be duplicated.
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