Play the Game has become one of my fav songs on this tour....kinda like Lap of the Gods was last tour. Similar placement...similar vibe. I love them both.
Same videographer in Barcelona and Cologne....PTG
I am also loving this little snippet of a song. It may sound very simple and unadorned, but it is fiendishly difficult for a tenor to sing in that key and in that style.
We've talked a lot about chest voice, head voice, falsetto, low register, high register, etc. This melody crosses back and forth over what is the natural break for a tenor between chest and head voice (or, if the singer cannot access his head voice, chest and falsetto.). The few notes of transition on either side of the "break" are called the singer's "passaggio." One of the biggest challenges for a classical singer is to make the passaggio seamless, so that the tone, resonance and volume of the notes, low to high, sound the same.
What's so difficult about that? As an analogy, imagine that you have two fan-made videos of Adam singing the same song. The problem is that there is interference, a fan screaming, and static on both videos, but at different places in the song. You want to create an audio combining the two versions into one, but the recordings were made with two different cell phones from two different places in the auditorium. How do you balance the different frequencies, volumes, echos, clarity, and color? I don't know anything about the electronics involved, but I can imagine you would need some sophisticated software and meticulous editing, plus a very fine ear.
Or, take the analogy of painting a picture. Let's say you are creating a beautiful landscape with a meadow, a lake, and a rainbow. You set it aside for a while, and your husband gets irritated that you left your painting supplies out all over the place, so he throws them all out. The original paints have been discontinued, and you have to finish the painting using different paints by different manufacturers, and in acrylic rather than oil. How do you make the rest of the painting seamlessly blend with the first part?
In PTG, the words "INSIDE," "DECIDE" and "play the GAME" require a register shift to head voice, then, immediately back to chest voice for the next words. Adam adjusts the quality of the tone of his chest voice to be lighter and purer, and with more ring, to match his head voice. He then makes minute changes in muscles to access the same tone in head voice. Just the smallest error and you would hear either a) a heaviness in the lower notes compared to the high notes, b) a crack in his voice as he misses the shift to head voice, c) an error in pitch as he jumps up and down between registers.
The other brilliant thing he demonstrates is his ability to continue in chest voice PAST the passaggio for the bridge section at the end ("My game has only just BEGUN"). That's what singers do when they "belt" a note. It usually sounds pushed or strained, powerful but not refined. Not Adam. The power is there, but he retains the brilliance and ring in the tone, so that it still matches the gentler voice at the beginning. It is masterfully sung.
It is very different from Freddie's version. In Freddie's studio version, he shifts from chest to falsetto. The falsetto notes have a naturally breathy quality to them. To match that, he actually adds a little breathiness to his chest voice. In the live versions I found, instead of shifting to falsetto, Freddie belts out the high notes, and changes the melody line to skip the high C note on "everybody play the GAME".
Before someone jumps on me for appearing to criticize Freddie...... WHOA. I am pointing out differences, not making judgments on which is "better." Freddie's sound is rock, while Adam's is classical. Which you prefer is a matter of taste. In terms of difficulty of technique, Adam's is adamazing.