Some Enchanted Evening

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1980

Label: RCA Red Seal

Twenty, or even ten, years ago an album of show tunes would have been regarded as run-of-the-mill product. It is a revealing and pertinent comment on the musical climate of the 1980's that such an album should now be seen as a musical oasis in a desert of mediocrity. On the other hand, at any time in the past thirty years this particular album would have been a musical milestone, combining as it does one of the finest voices of our time with eleven of the best-loved evergreens ever to emerge from that prolific source of great songs, the Broadway stage.

Benjamin Luxon's career has led him to starring roles at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, in Holland and Houston; to guest appearances with Ozawa and the Boston Symphony, Haitink and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and other fruitful collaborations in person and on record with the world's leading conductors. Nevertheless, the bearded Cornishman's virile baritone is so ideal an interpreter of equally virile stage songs that one feels instinctively he would have been quite at home as Biiiy Bigelow in Carousel 'Professor' Harold Hill in The Music Man or Curly in Oklahoma

Unlike some previous ventures into the popular repertoire by classical singers there is no suggestion of musical slumming by Mr. Luxon. He has at all times a studious regard for the lyrics
and music which represent the art of some of this century's greatest popular composers. What have become known as "the post-war musicals" denoted a remarkable development in that genre, in which the integration of music, lyrics and libretto first achieved by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II in "Show Boat" in 1927 reached its apogee.

As this new musical sophistication made extra demands upon the performer, so a new breed of stage singer emerged that was a far cry from the song and dance men and light comedians who had coped well enough with the more limited requirements of the average 1930's musical. Singers like Benjamin Luxon, in fact.

For example, no condescension is needed to sing Some Enchanted Evening, created by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the virtuoso performance of Ezio Pinza, one of the greatest bassos ever to tread the boards at the Metropolitan Opera, in his Broadway debut in South Pacific. The same men wrote their Oklahoma songs for the baritone Alfred Drake who, if he was not making his Broadway debut in this epochal 1943 musical (for the record, he had first appeared six years earlier in Babes In Arms at the age of 22) most assuredly made it his finest hour until his dazzling tour de force in Kismet a decade later.

Purely operatic is the context of I Got Plenty O' Nuffin, sung by Todd Duncan in the Original 1935 Porgy and Bess and by William Warfield alternating with Laverne Hutcherson in the more successful 1952 revival, and of Stan' Up And Fight. Hammerstein's adaptation of the famous Toreador Song from "Carmen." The source of this was Carmen Jones, the 1943 all-successful 1952 revival, and of Stan' Up And Fight, Wlllldlll anclllaullg up IIIUIU Hammerstein's adaptation of the famous Toreador Song from "Carmen," The source of this was Carmen Jones, the 1943 all-
black version of Bizet's opera, updated to wartime America, which succeeded to such an extent that one Runyunesque Broadway hanger-on was moved to rush up to producer Billy Rose, exclaiming incredulously 'What know, Billy. they're dorn' it at the Met in whiteface!"

From an earlier era is that one song which, although a hackneyed part of every baritone's repertoire, can scarely he omitted as a showcase for a great voice. Although forever associated with Paul Robeson UI' Man River was introduced in the original Broadway by Jules Bledsoe, Robeson only making it virtually his own properly in the London production and the 1935 Hollywood version.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's Soliloquy from Carouse is a prime example of the extended popular song form, which departs radically from the formula to convey the inner thoughts of an irresponsible waster suddenly faced with the prospect of fatherhood, and his hopes and dreams for the child he was destined never to know. Alternately bravura and tender. the Soliloquy is a modern aria demanding both vocal technique and acting ability. Sinatra's recordings and Gordon Macrae's screen performance have tended overshadow the original stage interpretation by John Raitt. These are definitive, yet the manner of Benjamin Luxon's delivery confirms that had this talented man come along alone a decade or two earlier he could have encompassed no little success on the musical stage on his way to operatic eminence.

One of the must beautiful of all popular ballads, All The Things You Are is all that remains of a Kern Hammerstein show which folded after a mere 59 performances at New York's Alvin Theatre in 1939. None of the other songs survived, and Very Warm For May is otherwise only notable in retrospect for having listed June Allyson and Vera Ellen among the chorus girls. Contrary to this experience. My Fair lady and The Street Where You Live have endured together. The news of a
forthcoming revival confirms that this was truly one of the most durable shows and scores of all time.

But what happened to Michael King, who sang on that street in 1956? Or to Larry Kert, hero of West Side .S`torywho first serenaded the lovely Maria a year later? Big song hits in long-running shows are not necessarily a passport to stardom, it seems! Babes In Arms, Rodgers and Hart's putting-on-a-show-in-the-barn musical, gave us another evergreen in Where Dr When featured by Mitzi Green and Ray Heatherton on Broadway and reprised by Betty Jaynes and big-voiced Douglas McPhail, with a little help from Judy Garland, in the screen version. Well balanced
and full of musical contrasts, Benjamin Luxon's programme reaches a climactic intermission point with the lusty 76 Trombones, a real show-stopper for Robert Preston in Meredith Willson's Music Man which marched gaily from the 1950's into the 60's. With this rousing 6/8 Owain Urwel Hughes and the National Philharmonic Orchestra, heard mainly in a discreet yet tasteful supporting role in Charles Gerhardt's apposite scores, really come into their own. Charles Gerhardt, already renowned for his RCA "Classic Film Scores:' surely found this album a labour of love to arrange and produce. lt shows, and if that series rescued from oblivion the work of the masters of Hollywood movie music this record ensures a new lease of life for these all-time great “songs from the shows.”

In a way you could also regard it as something of a tribute to possibly the greatest single force in the history of musical theatre, Oscar Hammerstein II, whose lyrical genius is evident in six of the eleven songs. This gentle giant, a rather than a lyricist per se, who was more at home on his farm in Doylestown Pennsylvania than in Manhattan, bestrode the American stage like a Colossus for forty years. His career spanned the years from old-style musical comedy from 1920 through the Romberg-style operetta period to the most important developments in modern music.

Twice he changed the direction of the American musical, with Jerome Kern in Shaw Boat and Richard Rodgers in Oklahoma and when he died in 1960 the world was singing his songs from
The Sound Of Music. Although both of his composing partners and other fine writers are represented here wouldn't it be nice to dedicate this album to Hammerstein's memory? He could have no finer epitaph.

ARTHUR JACKSON
Mr Jackson is the author of The Hollywood Musical and The Book of Musicals.