*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

Desert Song, Sigmund Romberg’s classic musical with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel, is brought to life in this 1959 Living Stereo recording. The cast features Giorgio Tozzi – a mainstay at the Metropolitan Opera at the time – Kathy Barr and Peter Palmer (Lil’ Abner). Legendary maestro Lehman Engel provided brand new arrangements as well as serving as musical director for the recording. Long unavailable in any format, this is the first release of the 1959 Studio Cast recording of Desert Song in the digital era.

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Thirty years ago the operetta stage reached one of its highest points when Sigmund Romberg's The Desert Song thundered across the stages of the world, thrilling audiences with its wonderful combination of romantic love songs and full-throated male singing ensembles. And when the dashing Red Shadow swept the love-struck Margo into his arms and carried her over the burning sands, he held every woman within hearing in the palm of his hand.

In the album you hold in your hands, two great voices of today, Giorgio Tozzi and Kathy Barr, sparkling modern orchestral arrangements by Lehman Engel, and the finest recording techniques are all blended to bring you a new RCA Victor production of The Desert Song which does full justice to the beloved Romberg melodies.

The rich, warm voice of Chicago-born, Milan-trained Giorgio Tozzi captures the excitement of “The Riff Song,” the dedicated love of “One Alone” and the beguil­ing romance of “The Desert Song.” You have only to listen to understand why Giorgio Tozzi is winning new laurels at the Metropolitan Opera each year.

Beautiful young Kathy Barr is the Margo of our production. She sings the difficult and demanding role, including the lovely “Romance” and “The Sabre Song,” with all of the vocal wizardry which has won her the applause of musical comedy and night club audiences from San Francisco to Monte Carlo.

Then there is the glorious singing ensemble to provide rich tones for the full-stage musical numbers, the likes of which are not being written any more. All in all, The Desert Song is a lovely recapture of a time gone by, told in the musical language of today by a pair of singing stars whose voices were made for each other. So put the disc on your player, lean back, and fall once more under the spell of The Desert Song.

– Leonard Louis Levinson, 1958, from the original liner notes for LOP-1000

Seventeen, a genial coming-of-age story, managed a Broadway run of 182 performances in the summer and fall of 1951 – not bad, considering that Guys and Dolls, Call Me Madam and The King and I were the new shows everyone wanted to see that year. Based on a novel by Booth Tarkington, Seventeen features a score by composer Walter Kent and lyricist Kim Gannon and book by Sally Benson. Produced by legendary TV star Milton Berle, Seventeen starred Kenneth Nelson (the original Matt in The Fantasticks and Michael in The Boys in the Band) and evokes a world located – to quote a line from the show – "somewhere between a headache and a heartache and a laugh." It's a loving snapshot of the era it depicts – pre-World War I small town America – filled with the gee-whiz charm of the post-World War II era when the show was written and produced. This is the first and only authorized CD version of Seventeen, digitally remastered from the original tapes.

...I can't remember having heard Graffman in Chopin and I found I kept jotting down notes about how extraordinarily well he plays this concerto... Graffman produces some marvellous pianism and I was left full of admiration for his playing. In the Mendelssohn he plays with great style and with the brilliance this agreeable, if not very remarkable, piece wants.

-- Gramophone [4/1966, reviewing the original LP release]

First Time on CD!

There seems to be little doubt that George Bernard Shaw could have been – had he so desired – as great an operetta librettist as he was a dramatist. For just as his play Pygmalion served as the basis upon which the phenomenal My Fair Lady was built, so fifty years ago it was Shaw's Arms and the Man that provided the foundation for the enchanting and enduring Chocolate Soldier. In fact, it was the Irish playwright himself who had once described Arms and the Man as “an opera bouffe without the music.”

W.A.Mozart, in his own thematic inventory, listed the Serenade “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” as comprising five movements: Allegro;Minuet and Trio I; Romance;Minuet and Trio II; and Finale. Indeed, the autograph manuscript was rediscovered in 1955, bearing unmistakable evidence of the first minuet (with trio) having been torn out. As it stands now, “A Little Night Music” is less of a serenade – ordinarily a lighthearted ramble with an extra minuet or even a whole concerto thrown into the mix of movements – than a small-scale classic string quartet.

While it is perfectly true that the works of the young Beethoven are exhilarating, most of all for their quotient of prophesy, the extraordinary vitality that suffuses the best of them is satistfying in itself. The unjustly neglected Quintet in C certainly merits that description.

During the time Dvorák was at work on the E-flat Quintet in Spillville, Iowa, in the summer of 1893, a small group of Iroquois Indians paid a visit to the town and performed each evening for the assembled Czech citizenry. The composer never missed these get-togethers and was much taken by the Iroquois art. Years later, Dvorák’s assistant Josef Kovarík maintained that the first movement of the Quintet owes its pervasive skipping rhythm to the Iroquois drums and dances.

-- Exceprts from album liner notes

R E V I E W S:

"Taut, intense, and beautifully shaped, the playing conveys the music’s drama, haunting lyricism, and bold originality. Hearing it, one is led to think that Leonard Bernstein committed a major omission when he said that “alone” among all composers, Beethoven had “a direct line to God.” The eerie tremolos of No. 15 here are stunningly otherworldly; the continuity and building tension of the second-movement variations in No. 14, compelling; the bold brashness of the opening of the “Quartettsatz,” intrusively arresting. And throughout all the performances, care with balances produces a welcome clarity of voicing that underscores Schubert’s harmonic daring."

FANFARE: Mortimer H. Frank

Lovely playing, as nearly always from these artists... The Quartettsatz was written four years before the A minor Quartet. There's certainly no lack of shivers and shudders here: indeed, you get the impression that the players were deliberately saving up all their disquiet for the key of C minor. The recording quality is very natural throughout.

-- Gramophone [2/1973, reviewing the original LP release of Quartets 12 and 14]

This selection is available for a limited time as a special import.

For a startling premonition of Arvo Part's unmistakable brand of heterophony, cue 3'16'' into track 1 of Kontrapunkt's disc See album (or 3'09'' into the same track on the RCA reissue) and the evidence is clear as day: a weeping incantation that, if taken out of context, could easily have grown among the pages of Part's more recent instrumental works. Eight years in the making, Prokofiev's F minor Sonata—surely his greatest chamber work—opens bleakly, then flowers to harmonic richness before switching to a sharp-edged Allegro brusco, a deeply introspective Andante and a closing Allegrissimo that recalls (or anticipates, depending on its precise chronology in Prokofiev's thinking) the finale of the great Eighth Piano Sonata. David Oistrakh was the work's dedicatee and his recordings of it (there have been at least four over the years, of which only one on Praga—(CD) 250041—is currently available) exhibit such tonal and interpretative distinction that any newcomers will need to summon all their powers to compete.

Of the two performances under review, Perlman's is the more securely focused—an immensely assured, sweet-centred reading, delicate where needs be (the ''wind in a graveyard'' passages of the first movement, for example) and yet with a Heifetzian resilience that both sonatas willingly respond to. Nikolai Madojan, a highly gifted product of Zacha Bron's school in Novosibirsk and still only in his early twenties, favours more neutral colouring but has a natural feel for the 'right' inflexion: of the two performances, his is the more thought-provoking (in that respect, Madojan is more akin to Kremer or Oistrakh than to Perlman), while Perlman's has the more rounded tone production. Furthermore, both pianists are ideally suited to their partners—Ashkenazy being the more incisive and percussive, Westenholz refreshingly tender-hearted and imaginative.

When it comes to the delightful Second Sonata—of rather less import, and a second-hand utterance (the original was for flute and piano)—Perlman and Ashkenazy play with astonishing virtuosity and here their visceral virtues win hands down, especially in the Scherzo. Madojan and Westenholz are more restrained and although their innate musicality pays high dividends (especially as heard immediately after the intensely private Melodies), the second and fourth movements are marginally under-characterized.

Kontrapunkt's CD is a good one and will not disappoint those who are attracted by the programme. Kremer and Argerich offer an identical coupling, but their distinctive bravura (cerebral as well as physical) may not be to everyone's taste. Oistrakh's version of the First Sonata is essential listening, although Praga's recording is less than ideal, while Viktoria Mullova offers a first-rate alternative account of the Second Sonata. However, the first-time collector has a real bargain in RCA's mid-price coupling: it may not dig quite as deep as some rivals, but the playing has real class, the recording is clean (if rather brittle) and there's a substantial bonus in Perlman's accomplished 1966 version of the Second Violin Concerto, where Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony trace and characterize the score's every subtle detail—especially among the woodwind. That, for me, is the disc's most indelible interpretative feature.

-- Gramophone [9/1994]

REBOUNDS - CONCERTOS FOR PERCU

WEBER WORKS FOR PNO & ORCH OP

Listening to the youthful tone and secure technique exhibited on this recital, it seems hard to credit that Hagegard is now in his mid-fifties. The voice seems hardly altered from the firm, attractive instrument I first heard at the Wigmore Hall in the 1970s, except that it has grown in size and strength at the top, a feature advantageous here in the searing climaxes of Brahms's 'Aufdem Kirchhofe' and 'Verrat' (Nos. 4 and 5 of Fünf Lieder), the former rivalling a noted reading by Hotter, the latter a famous interpretation by Kipnis. Hagegârd's biting diction and sense of the inner drama in both songs is typical of his understanding of the genre. At the same time, he still possesses in abundance the mellow tone and firm line to do justice to such lyrical pearls as 'Wie Melodien zieht' and 'Immer leiser', Nos. 1 and 2 from Op. 105.

In Sibelius he is predictably at home, peering into the soul of these songs of longing. The most notable part of his interpretations of Stenhammar is the remarkable mezza voce he sustains throughout the two lovely songs from Op. 20, fine pieces, ideally interpreted.

Only in Brahms's Ernste Gesange, where Kipnis and Hotter are again the benchmarks, must there be reservations, simply because these grave pieces demand a weight of tone Hagegard's almost heroic baritone doesn't possess. At least that's true of his accounts of the first two, deeply depressing pieces. In the consolation of the second half of the third song and the beam of New Testament light of the finale, the flexibility and range of the baritone's performance is splendidly apt. Warren Jones is an adaptable and sensitive player. The slightly too reverberant recording shouldn't deter anyone from acquiring this thoughtful and rewarding programme.

-- Gramophone [8/1999]

Rubinstein Collection, Vol. 74: Brahms: Piano Quartet No. 2

REVIEWS:
BBC Music (5/98, pp.68-69) - Performance: 5 (out of 5), Sound: 4 (out of 5) - "...Following the ebb and flow of the music, Meyers produces a marvellous variety of tone....This is playing of rare sensitivity which seems perfectly in tune with the lyrical and contemplative nature of the [first violin] concerto..."

'I Will Breathe a Mountain' is a new cycle of songs from William Bolcom, written for Marilyn Horne as part of the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Carnegie Hall. Bolcom sets eleven poems by eleven women, including Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, in a variety of styles ranging from ragtime and cabaret oriented numbers to straightforward art songs. The result is impressive and is minutely tailored to Horne's particular vocal and interpretive strengths.
Horne has always been a distinguished interpreter of Bernstein. Here she sings excerpts from his theater and concert works to great effect, including the number from 'Songfest' intended for her as well as a song from the elusive '1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,' his final musical. Although recorded a bit late in the singer's career, it is good to have Horne's thoughts on the music of Samuel Barber. The songs are among the most beautiful of American art songs. This is an important addition to the legacy of recorded American song.