Review of Young at Heart (2008) by Chads. — 23 May 2008

Avant-garde composer/musician John Zorn said this about the Langley School Music Project, "This is is beauty. This is truth. This is music that touches the heart in a way no other music ever has, or ever could.

" Unlike the field recordings of the seventies era-Canadian school children(led by music teacher Hans Fenger) who would go on to inspire Richard Linklater's "The School of Rock", there's a knowingness behind the retirement home chorus renditions of post-punk standards like "Life During Wartime"(David Byrne) and "Schizophrenia"(Thurston Moore), which has the subtle reek of exploitation.

The manipulation is deliberative and a little too choreographed. The music director knows exactly how these fragile people, who quite literally throughout "Young at Heart", drop like flies, will impact an audience, when interpreting songs about their impending mortality(most astonishingly, we hear The Police's "Every Breath You Take", a song about romantic obsession, with new ears).

So you have to negotiate a little calculation with your "up with old people" uplift. But there are exceptions; most notably, the guy in the wheelchair whose modest, plaintive voice finds the truth in Coldplay's "Fix You".

I'm cynical, but not that cynical.