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Did any of you catch the live broadcast Monday
night of the great Gershwin opera?
The sound quality was horrendous. I
emailed WQXR yesterday to ask if the
feed coming from WNET was lousy: no low end, peak limiting, loud hiss. I love Gershwin's stuff when done correctly (yeah, that's subjective). This just wasn't right. I'd left it to the last minute to patch the feed for recording & didn't have time to compare any differences that might have been detectable between my FM & VCR tuners. Of the performances, the most glaringly deficient as compared to the paradigm 1951 Columbia Masterworks tour de force was Sportin' Life. Avon Long, who did the role in the album & the 1942 Broadway revival brought out a truly slimy, unctuous aspect of the character simply missing in the vapid portrayal. I have some examples of John W. Bubbles' performance (he originated the role). Long's the best I've yet heard. Similarly, Crown's braggadocio was limp in the new performance. The direction apparently aimed at extracting precise operatic technique, rather than the pathos of the version produced by Goddard Liebersen 51 years ago. One of the funniest editorial comments about the
opus was by Oscar Levant, that 'it was the greatest Jewish opera ever
written'.
About George's orchestral stuff, my favorite is the relatively little known "Second Rhapsody", which was fleshed out from a kind of nightmare sequence in the 1930 film "Delicious". Second to that, Concerto In F. For poignancy of melody, prelude #2. About their Broadway shows: George & Ira tried to address relevant, topical issues. "Strike Up The Band" is about jingoism and war: The U.S. goes to war against Switzerland because of the political influence of the magnate who makes 'Fletcher's American Cheese'. In "Of Thee I Sing", there's a coup d'etat against the President because he refuses to marry the winner of a beauty pageant who's to become The First Lady. This show was the first musical to win a Pulitzer. Its sequel was "Let 'Em Eat Cake". There's a nice Sony 2CD set of the two done at The Brooklyn Academy Of Music perhaps about 10 years ago. In it, Jack Guilford did a wonderful, entertaining performance of Vice-President Throttlebottom It's interesting to hear the songs in the context of their books. "The Man I Love", which for years has deservedly been a great ballad is meant to be sarcastic and cynical. In the story, the gal singing it is telling her aspiring beau that because he thinks that it's insane to fight over cheese, that she can't love him, and proceeds to explain whom she could love. Ira's writing was brilliant, witty and subtle. He'd pull in not quite related topics to make a rhyme. In "Of Thee I Sing" another great song is "Who Cares?" Relative to the widespread bank failures when the show was running, there's this wonderful couplet: Who cares if banks fail in Yonkers, Long as you have the kiss that conquers... My objection to most arrangements & performances of the Gershwins' stuff is that it's played reverentially if not with grossly excess dollops of schmaltz. A particularly nauseating example is the soundtrack of Woody Allen's "Manhattan". Shiffy |