This 1995 outdoor concert captures Annie Lennox at the climax of her emergence as a solo performer, drawing from both her stunning, largely self-written 1992 debut album, Diva, and its immaculately crafted sequel, Medusa, devoted to gourmet cover performances. With Lennox in powerful voice, a solid live band attuned to the material's mix of pop, rock, and R&B accents, and an enraptured audience, Live in Central Park thus charms from opening downbeat to final coda, retaining Lennox's usual bracing mix of intelligence and drama. With her close-cropped, dark hair and bold tartan outfit, the erstwhile Eurythmic dials down the sharper edges and chillier mood of that band's most stylized work to focus on the haunted passions that bridge the Scot's solo and group efforts; her choice of songs from her old band's repertoire locks snugly into the spectrum of romantic obsession, heartbreak, and resignation that shape solo signatures like "Walking on Broken Glass," "No More 'I Love You's'," and "Little Bird." The concert footage is solidly shot and recorded, while the audio recording is crisp if not optimally mixed for 5.1 surround coverage, a fate neither surprising nor uncommon for a pre-DVD era production. Four promotional clips, produced for the Medusa project, largely offset such flaws, especially in light of her scant output since. --Sam Sutherland
