Word: hammersteins
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SHOW BOAT (EMI). The classic Mississippi musical jes' keeps rollin' along, here with such stern-wheeling operatic voices as Frederica von Stade and Teresa Stratas. The first recording that is completely faithful to the original Kern-Hammerstein score reveals a raw, powerful, even angry work. And you thought it was "only make-believe...
Since 1985, when Leonard Bernstein's 1957 musical West Side Story was released with an operatic cast that included soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and tenor Jose Carreras -- and sold handsomely -- other shows have got the tony treatment on records: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel (1945) and South Pacific (1949), and Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956). Now, most impressive of all, comes Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's 1927 musical adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat...
...dusty operetta, but it is really a moving piece of music drama," says conductor John McGlinn, 35, whose passion for the score drove him to record the Mississippi riverboat musical in its complete 1927 version. McGlinn restored the overture, reinstating three important ensemble numbers and, most controversially, insisting on Hammerstein's original dialogue, which includes use of the word nigger. The result is a Show Boat wiped clean of the sentimental and sanitized patina it had acquired over the years. In its place stands a raw, powerful and angry work whose seriousness of purpose and lofty artistic aspirations are umistakable...
Lloyd Webber attended Magdalen College at Oxford, in part because he had heard it harbored some of Britain's most promising lyricists. But the man who turned out to be the Oscar Hammerstein to his Rodgers came in the person of Tim Rice, a London law student with a penchant for pop music. Introduced by a London publisher, the pair hit it off at once, and Andrew promptly dropped out of Oxford. To hone his technique, he enrolled at the Royal College of Music. His father, surprisingly, warned him not to let the school educate away his natural gifts...
...unexpected rave led to a recording. Lloyd Webber's deft gift for parody (the Elvis homage of Pharaoh's Story) and melodic invention (Joseph's moving anthem Close Every Door) captured a wide audience. "Without realizing it," recalls Rice, "we were breaking new ground by forgetting about Rodgers and Hammerstein...