Raquel Bitton (born in Marrakesh, Morocco) is a critically acclaimed French jazz singer and interpreter of Edith Piaf's songs.
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As a teenager in 1970, Bitton moved to San Francisco, where she began to work on the songs from the French Age d’Or ('Golden Age'). Her passion for music and song led her to the Edith Piaf songbook. Bitton became a renowned interpreter of Edith Piaf's music.
Bitton's hit show, “Raquel Bitton sings Piaf - her story, her songs” has been performed across North America including selling out Carnegie Hall.[1] Critic Ann Powers, writing in the New York Times, liked Bitton's low-key treatment as she "served her subject by de-emphasizing the pathos in favour of the craft", using "calm narration". Bitton "did well to concentrate on the great singer as a virtuoso rather than a heroine" as the legend was impossible to live up to, but "a bright interpreter like Ms. Bitton certainly can illuminate it", wrote Powers.[2]
The show “PIAF- her story, her songs” was made into a film which won first place at the 25th Classic Telly awards, and received the Special Jury Award for most moving film experience at The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival.[3]
Critic Barry Singer wrote[4], "Where singers are concerned, imitation ... is never solely an act of homage, however inspired by admiration."[5] Bitton, Singer continued, "is, to put it mildly, stuck on Edith Piaf", and he lists Bitton's Piaf-focused activities: a radio show; a TV documentary; a play; the scenario for a ballet;[6] and "most decisively, learned to sing very much like her idol".[5] The result is eerie, as Bitton performs with "exacting verisimilitude" and "unmistakable passion", "the requisite fierceness of elocution, fluttery intensity of vibrato, and R's rolled like a flotilla of drunken sailors", and "more than a touch of ghoulishness", wrote Singer.[5] The problem is that in so meticulously recreating Piaf's sound, Bitton "buries most of the 'Little Sparrow's' incandescence, Singer concludes.[5]