Elvis Lives

A string quartet swells and dives in the best late20th-century highbrow style. The audience prepares for yet another experience of programfanning serious music. Then the singer enters howling. "You're a swine and I'm saying that's an insult to the pig!"

That's no diva—that's Elvis Costello. The 38year-old British singer-songwriter once again has swan-dived into strange waters: he has composed an hour-long song cycle with the Brodsky Quartet, a classical ensemble which usually tackles material by Schubert and Shostakovich. Costello met the quartet in the fall of 1991 after attending a series of its performances. They struck up a friendship and eventually committed to do some sort of performance together at a small hall in London in the summer of 1992. Ambition got the better of them, and Costello and the quartet decided to write an original piece that would take advantage of their respective strengths—the quartet's musical depth and dexterity, and Costello's wit and vitriol. The result, The Juliet Letters, is a serious collaboration for voice and strings with periodic belly laughs. A recording of the effort was recently released by Warner Bros. Records, but Costello insists that this is not a "crossover" album. "It's just music—music that comes more from a collision or collaboration than an attempt to take one thing and move it to another place."

Although his attention is focused on The Juliet Letters and "standing shoulder to shoulder with the Brodskys," Costello will not leave 1993 littered lightly with his gifts. He is recording a new rock album this fall which will probably be followed by an album of songs by childhood idols such as Bob Dylan and the Kinks. Strangest, though, is an album he wrote for Wendy James, a British singer who aspires to Madonna-dom. The album, written in the punkrock style of Costello's early work, is exactly the sort of music his old fans pray for and which Costello considers juvenilia. The Wendy James disc sounds disconcertingly like a young woman of dubious pitch singing along to This Year's Model on a karaoke machine.

"I said once that Spike was my first comedy record," Costello says. "I think the Wendy James record could very likely be my second." Then, catching himself, he adds, "A bold comedy record in the kindest sense of the word."

BILL FLANAGAN