Port Stanley News - Port Stanley, Ontario, Canada
McCartney Magic in Port Stanley
Port Stanley News
March 13, 2010
By Francie Dennison
Port Stanley News
March 13, 2010
By Francie Dennison
Yuri Pool in concert on Friday night at the Port Stanley Festival Theatre worked an exceptional kind of magic on the sold out crowd.
The Port Stanley Festival Theatre is a small theatre with wonderful acoustics, a fact commented upon by each performer in this music series. On March 12, 2010 it was filled to capacity with a broad mix of ages and 50 would-be concert goers disappointingly had to be turned away.
Yuri Pool, founder of The McCartney Years - Beatles tribute show, was on his own this evening, without his band or back-up singers. With no one to add interesting little music runs or harmonies, how was this going to sound anything like the Beatles? Well it did not take long to find out. With a voice that frequently sounds amazingly like Paul McCartney's and arrangements that were true to the original songs we all know and love, Yuri opened loud and clear. He had the audience in his hands with the first song. When he performed one of Ringo's songs and jokingly said he sounded just like him, "Better!" rang out the voice of a woman in the audience.
Yuri's performance was like stepping back more than thirty years in time. These were the songs of my youth being performed by man younger than my daughter and with all the energy and vigour I remember seeing when the original Beatles performed them. This was not some tired, grey-haired man whose voice was past it's prime performing songs from the days when the grey-haired audience was young. Yuri's performance was as alive and fresh as the original.
Looking around, I saw the audience was also not entirely grey-haired. Down in the front row a group of kids had their cell phones open with the screens facing the stage and doing a side-to-side wave in time to the music. I don't know what that was all about, but it was interesting. Long before intermission the audience was singing along and clapping time to the music.
In the last half of the show Yuri and the audience were clearly feeding off each other's energy. The singing along from the audience could now be clearly heard, adding their own back-up chorus vocals to Yuri's show and clapping in perfect time at the right spots of a song. Yuri's stage antics and high vocals intensified as the show became more and more like a live Beatles concert of old.
The standing ovation at the end of the already over-time show brought Yuri back for an encore. "I knew you had more energy in you," Yuri grinned as he sat back down at the key board. One more favourite Beatles song performed by both Yuri and the audience, with one more standing ovation, brought this truly magical evening to a close. I left the theatre with a lighter step, a smile on my face and feeling a good thirty years younger. Now that was a concert!
Francie Dennison
March 13, 2010
The Port Stanley Festival Theatre is a small theatre with wonderful acoustics, a fact commented upon by each performer in this music series. On March 12, 2010 it was filled to capacity with a broad mix of ages and 50 would-be concert goers disappointingly had to be turned away.
Yuri Pool, founder of The McCartney Years - Beatles tribute show, was on his own this evening, without his band or back-up singers. With no one to add interesting little music runs or harmonies, how was this going to sound anything like the Beatles? Well it did not take long to find out. With a voice that frequently sounds amazingly like Paul McCartney's and arrangements that were true to the original songs we all know and love, Yuri opened loud and clear. He had the audience in his hands with the first song. When he performed one of Ringo's songs and jokingly said he sounded just like him, "Better!" rang out the voice of a woman in the audience.
Yuri's performance was like stepping back more than thirty years in time. These were the songs of my youth being performed by man younger than my daughter and with all the energy and vigour I remember seeing when the original Beatles performed them. This was not some tired, grey-haired man whose voice was past it's prime performing songs from the days when the grey-haired audience was young. Yuri's performance was as alive and fresh as the original.
Looking around, I saw the audience was also not entirely grey-haired. Down in the front row a group of kids had their cell phones open with the screens facing the stage and doing a side-to-side wave in time to the music. I don't know what that was all about, but it was interesting. Long before intermission the audience was singing along and clapping time to the music.
In the last half of the show Yuri and the audience were clearly feeding off each other's energy. The singing along from the audience could now be clearly heard, adding their own back-up chorus vocals to Yuri's show and clapping in perfect time at the right spots of a song. Yuri's stage antics and high vocals intensified as the show became more and more like a live Beatles concert of old.
The standing ovation at the end of the already over-time show brought Yuri back for an encore. "I knew you had more energy in you," Yuri grinned as he sat back down at the key board. One more favourite Beatles song performed by both Yuri and the audience, with one more standing ovation, brought this truly magical evening to a close. I left the theatre with a lighter step, a smile on my face and feeling a good thirty years younger. Now that was a concert!
Francie Dennison
March 13, 2010