Was just thinking that my favorite vocal performance of all time isn’t even in a song, as most people would think of it.
My favorite vocal performance of all time is Miranda Otto as Éowyn in her grief belting out the threnody for her brother in the extended edition of The Two Towers.
Otto is not a trained singer yet she delivers a better, rawer performance than anyone could’ve imagined. The story goes that they were going to have her mouth the song, and then a trained singer do the part, but she wanted to try it herself. When she tried the first time, Peter Jackson and the cast was like, “Well, we don’t need to find that singer now.”
Of course it was recorded in a studio. There’s absolutely no way to have decent audio in an open field with wind blowing and a hundred people around. Just cannot happen. But that’s Otto singing and it sounds like her, which makes it so much better. The performance is less than a minute and it’s perfect — both her voice and her acting in the scene. She looks paralyzed with grief. She’s truly underrated and I wish she’d been in more.
By the way, that language is Old English. I started learning a bit of it years ago so I could understand her performance and read some. It’s not that hard though it does have genders and cases, oh so many cases. Like Latin? Then you’ll love Old English.
