It is now less than one month to Eurovision 2013, the annual Europe-wide song contest. It’s therefore not a moment too soon to report back with an update on what happened with Germany’s official entry in the contest.

As you might recall, right after the group Cascada won the right to represent Germany in the Eurovision 2013 contest, a protest was filed that their song, Glorious, was a copy of the 2012 winner, Euphoria. My blog post, complete with song links is here.

Well, I can now report that upon further review, those two similar sounding songs were deemed to be not so similar after all. So, Cascada has been cleared to carry on and perform Glorious next month of the Eurovision 2013 contest. I know, you were worried. But now you know you can relax and see if the same-sounding-but-ruled-not-the-same song can win (again) this year.

In other Eurovision news, I ran across an unexpected connection between Eurovision and Broadway, which I thought I’d pass along:

The musical Les Miserables catapulted an Irish singer by the name of Colm Wilkinson to worldwide stardom — in musicals circles, at least —back in the mid-1980s. He originated the role of Jean Valjean in that show, and became somewhat of a legend because his tenor voice has a range that’s quite unusual for musical comedy stars. I always figured that perhaps his background was originally opera, and then he turned to Broadway-style singing later.

But, as it turns out, Colm Wilkinson actually started in his career as an Irish pop star. In 1978, he wrote a song, Born to Sing, which was chosen as Ireland’s 1978 entry in the Eurovision song contest. The song  — which he performed live in the contest — came in 5th.  As a pop singer, his voice reminds me a bit of Neil Diamond – or, at least,  his song sounds like something Neil Diamond could have written and sung.

Who knew that the road that lay ahead for him would lead him to fame and fortune in musical theatre with a completely different style of singing. I’m not sure if the woman who is the lead singer in Cascada will have a similar career trajectory in years to come.  But, then again, it may not be possible to see that far down the road.

After all, who would have predicted that the 1974 winners, Abba, would parlay a catalog of hit pop songs into a popular musical. It first opened in 1999 (London) and 2001 (Broadway). And it’s still going strong all those years later.

But will Cascada have such a Glorious future? Stay tuned.

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A view links to a few songs performed by Colm Wilkinson

• Born to Sing – 1978 Eurovision entry from Ireland
• Who am I? – a song from Les Miserable
  
• Bring Him Home –  the big ballad toward the end of Les Miserable that requires a high tenor voice to sing it properly
• The Music of the Night – the big ballad from the musical Phantom of the Opera. Colm Wilkinson was the first choice to play this role, being offered this and Les Miserable at the same time – he chose Les Miserables, but later did perform in the other role

BTW, that Bring Him Home song is the one he is most noted for, particularly, for the smooth transitions to and from the falsetto range of his voice. The song was actually written for Wilkinson’s vocal range  – and it is definitely not trivial to hit all the notes in that song.  In fact, tenors find it so hard there’s a parody song somebody wrote called Bring it Down, which you can hear in this clip. Cute.