ABSTRACT
Among the singer-songwriters in the chanson tradition Jacques Brel is one of the best known outside France. Brel the legendary stage-performer has best been captured on record in his 1964 concert album, which includes the barnstorming first performance of 'Amsterdam', an atmospheric portrait of harbour-front low-life which typically builds to a crescendo of intensity. In 1962 Brel changed record labels and joined Barclay, and this was the beginning of an extraordinarily rich period of recordings. Many of Brel's songs, even when they are ostensibly portraits of a character or a milieu, confront in an explicit way problems of existential despair: the impossibility of hope, the absurdity of life, the unacceptable inevitability of death. As a stage performer, his forcefulness was legendary, and it was built on a refinement of the art of self-presentation, a sense of timing and dramatic or comic effect which has never been surpassed.
