Donna Summer earned the title “disco queen” early in her career. Today, her voice continues to soar with boundless range and fire whether recorded or live. Her Wolf Trap concert Sunday will find the personable winner of Grammy Awards, gold albums, an Oscar and dozens of other honors in top form.
The show will include favorites from her repertoire and songs from her album in progress, a collection of standards decked out with glitz and glamour to reawaken memories. As an added incentive to dance in the aisles and on the lawn, she will sing “To Paris With Love,” her latest release — already a hit — with an irresistible melody and her signature disco beat.
“France was one of the first countries to embrace my music, and I absolutely love Paris, so I wanted to write a song expressing my affection,” she said. “The advantage of performing in Europe for many years before returning home is that the experience taught me my general outlook on fame. Americans want it right away, but Europeans have a more sober idea of fame. They look at it as a distant thing to achieve.
“I initially thought we’d release the song in the south of France, but Bruce Roberts, who composed it with me, thought it was perfect for summertime everywhere, so we put it out for my fans as an escape to the romance and allure of the City of Lights.”
Summer has been a favorite in Europe since arriving in Germany during the late 1960s to play Sheila in “Hair.” Employing the art of characterization she developed in that show and succeeding musicals, she amassed fans at live concerts and began recording songs in the disco style that soon defined her. To this day, other musicians clamor to cover the songs she made famous, many of them her own compositions.
“I tell the story of each song I sing by becoming the character in the song,” she said. “She can be light and fluffy, a serious woman, or something in between. I paint with words. I wrote my earlier album ‘Crayons’ with the idea that each song stands for a different color in a box of crayons and represents a different dance style.”
A veritable bundle of energy, Summer is one of the most popular personalities in show business and is always ready and willing to pay homage to others. She sang in tribute to her close friend Barbra Streisand at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2008 and more recently in Oslo, Norway when President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. She herself was honored in June as an inductee of the Hollywood Bowl of Fame together with the Carpenters and French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. After her performance, Michael Christie, conductor of the Phoenix Symphony, rushed backstage to invite her to be the headliner at the orchestra’s gala concert in October.
“The show we’re planning for Phoenix has everything: dancing, singing and visuals,” she said. “I love performing with symphonies and always laugh when I overhear the musicians griping and wondering why they have to play for me. Then they look at the charts. They have to learn them very quickly and pay attention to every note. Getting it right is a lot more difficult than they realized, and many come up to me afterward and apologize.”
While Summer is recording her next album, “Ordinary Girl” sits on the back burner. She began writing the musical shortly after her autobiography by the same name was published. At the time, she intended for the show bursting with her classic numbers to be a Broadway vehicle for her three talented daughters, but now that one has her own band and is on the road much of the time, Broadway must wait.
“As a regular mom, you have to be careful what you say, and when you’re in the business, you have to let them find their own way,” she said. “Even though being on the road and singing is a lot of work, I love every minute of it and always look forward to entertaining my fans.”
