CDs: Brava Bronhill
In late 2005, the U.K. label Classics for Pleasure, a branch of EMI, released more than a dozen CDs restoring to the catalogue some fairly obscure recordings of musicals and operettas. I recently discussed two of the discs, and today I'm looking at three more EMI/Classics for Pleasure CDs, each offering compilation reissues of operetta recordings.
The Merry Widow is one of the two most popular and frequently performed of all European operettas, the other being Die Fledermaus. Like Die Fledermaus, The Merry Widow is a comic piece that has been performed at the Metropolitan and New York City Operas. And for musical-theatre fans who think they don't like operetta, The Merry Widow score often turns out to be surprisingly accessible and appealing.
With music by the Hungarian-born Franz Lehar, The Merry Widow Die Lustige Witwe had its premiere at Vienna's Theater an der Wien in 1905. It quickly traveled to London, then was a Broadway sensation, playing the New Amsterdam Theatre current home to The Lion King for a year's run. Set at the embassy of the mythical kingdom of Marsovia Pontevedro in German, the economically challenged country looks to Prince Danilo a count in the Vienna version to woo and wed his old flame, the rich widow Sonia Hanna in Vienna. Danilo is reluctant to be thought of as a gold-digger, but it turns out that the two have genuine feelings for each other. In a score that's entirely enchanting, the most celebrated numbers are probably Hanna's Act Two solo "Vilia," and the final act's waltz for Hanna and Danilo.
The Merry Widow has had several Broadway revivals, the most successful in 1943, and was also performed by Music Theatre of Lincoln Center in 1964, with Patrice Munsel. In recent times, the work has been taken up by opera houses, where it has attracted such divas as Beverly Sills and Joan Sutherland. There are TV versions with Sills, Sutherland, Anne Jeffreys, and Yvonne Kenny; a '34 movie with Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette McDonald; and a turgid '52 film remake with Lana Turner. And there are many, many recordings, some in the original German, others in various English translations; recent reissues have included the Widows of Dorothy Kirsten and Kitty Carlisle.
In 1958, The Merry Widow was a big hit all over again when it entered the repertory of London's Sadler's Well Opera, in a new translation with lyrics by Christopher Hassall. Starring June Bronhill, the production got an HMV cast recording. Bronhill 1929-2005, an Australian, was a prominent leading lady at Sadler's Wells in the '50s and '60s. In 1965, she won acclaim portraying poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the West End musical Robert and Elizabeth, a show that featured a lush score very much in the operetta mode. Bronhill repeated Robert and Elizabeth in Australia, where she had been the first Maria in The Sound of Music. She returned to London in 1981 to play the Mother Abbess in the Petula Clark revival of The Sound of Music, and subsequent Australian appearances for Bronhill included The Pirates of Penzance, Women Behind Bars, and Call Me Madam. Bronhill also made many operetta recordings, but the Widow was her signature role; she continued to sing it into the 1980s, and her autobiography was called The Merry Bronhill.
In 1968, Bronhill made a second recording of The Merry Widow for EMI, again in the Hassall translation, and it is this second Bronhill Widow that Classics for Pleasure has now reissued. Opposite her as Danilo is Jeremy Brett, the actor probably best known for a healthy run on TV as Sherlock Holmes. He also played Freddy in the My Fair Lady film, appeared in the London musicals Marigold and Johnny the Priest, and played Danilo on British TV just prior to recording this Widow. The recording's second female lead is mezzo Ann Howard, who can also be heard on U.K. cast recordings of Candide and Into the Woods.
Bronhill has a radiant soprano, rich in tone and rising effortlessly to the upper range. She also had a grand way with words. A distinctive, unmistakable singer, she makes a delightful Widow. Brett does well enough in Danilo's famous opening number, "Maxim's." But a substantial part of the role lies out of his range, so much of the music has been lowered or otherwise altered, and the recording is thus compromised.
Classics for Pleasure's new Merry Widow CD is filled out with songs from two other operettas, both of which were much more successful in the West End than on Broadway. There are five numbers from a 1959 45 EP disc of The Lilac Domino, a German work produced on Broadway in 1914, and another piece featuring a merry widow. And then there are six songs from a 1959 EMI LP of The Belle of New York, produced on Broadway in 1897 for fifty-six performances, but in London for 697 performances. Like the Brecht-Weill Happy End and Broadway's Guys and Dolls, The Belle of New York features a Salvation Army heroine. MGM's 1952 Fred Astaire/Vera-Ellen film version had little to do with the stage script, and featured new songs.
Our second Classics for Pleasure CD of the day combines two HMV British studio-cast LPs, both recordings of musicals whose scores were adapted from the work of classical composers and whose subjects were those composers' lives. In 1916, Vienna saw Das Dreimaderlhaus House of the Three Girls, featuring the music of Franz Schubert along with a fictionalized account of Schubert's love life. With the music adapted by Heinrich Berte, the show played over 1000 performances in Austria and Germany.
For Broadway, the show was picked up by the Shuberts, who felt that some changes were necessary. So they hired Sigmund Romberg The Student Prince, The Desert Song, The New Moon to arrange the Schubert melodies, with new lyrics by Dorothy Donnelly. Retitled Blossom Time for Broadway in 1921, it ran for 516 performances. In London, the show was called Lilac Time, with lyrics by Adrian Ross. With the music arranged by G. H. Clutsam using some of Berte's work, Lilac Time ran 626 performances. The London score concentrated more on familiar Schubert than did Romberg's Broadway version. Both the Broadway and West End versions toured extensively in subsequent decades.
Bronhill is again the star on the 1959 studio recording of the British version, Lilac Time, featured on the new Classics for Pleasure CD. Tenor Thomas Round, Bronhill's original Danilo in London, sings the role of Schubert. Tremendously popular in its day, Blossom/Lilac Time is now little-known, but it's quite a pretty score. HMV recordings from this period invariably had superior sound and stereo, and this one sounds better than ever, with Bronhill, as always, a plus.
Lilac Time is happily paired on the new CD with a more famous example of the same genre, Song of Norway, featuring the music and fictionalized story of Norway's Edvard Grieg. Adapting the music and writing the lyrics was the team of Robert Wright and George Forrest, a pair that was later responsible for the most durable classical-composer show, Kismet although that one had nothing to do with the life of its source composer, Russian Alexander Borodin.
Song of Norway was a World War II Broadway smash. The 1944 show played 860 performances, perhaps the last big operetta success on Broadway. The score ranges from the haunting love duet "Strange Music" to the lively "Freddy and His Fiddle." Song of Norway has two New York cast recordings, the Broadway original on Decca and Columbia's Jones Beach cast. The 1960 British studio recording offered on the new Classics for Pleasure CD is not as colorful as the two New York versions, but it's well sung. Thomas Round again appears, playing Grieg's friend Nordraak, but the best work is from Victoria Elliott as the other-woman prima donna.
This CD combination of Lilac Time and Song of Norway runs about eighty minutes, so the last track of the original HMV Song of Norway LP -the Grieg piano concerto-has been omitted on the CD.
Our third EMI/Classics for Pleasure CD of the day is a Bronhill double feature, two 1960 entries in the series of operetta recordings that Bronhill made in the wake of her Merry Widow London success. And half of this third CD is devoted to another show about and featuring the pre-existing music of a celebrated composer. Premiering in Vienna in 1930, Waltzes from Vienna offered the fictionalized account of the difficult relationship between father-and-son waltz kings Johann Strauss I and II the latter the composer of Die Fledermaus, with father attempting to suppress his son's career as composer and conductor. The score featured several of the best-known Strauss themes, arranged by Erich Korngold and Julius Bittner.
With English lyrics by Desmond Carter, Waltzes from Vienna proved popular in London in 1931. Then it became a 1934 Broadway hit under the title The Great Waltz and with the distinguished playwright Moss Hart revising the book. Wright and Forrest did their own version of the book, music, and lyrics on the West Coast in the late '40s, a production that was revived and recorded in the mid-'60s then transferred to London for a long run beginning in 1970. Alfred Hitchcock directed the 1934 film of Waltzes from Vienna. In Hollywood, it became The Great Waltz in 1938, with Luise Rainer, and that title was remade in 1972 as an unnecessary follow-up to the disastrous 1970 film version of Song of Norway.
The 1960 recording of Waltzes from Vienna employs the original British version of the lyrics. Bronhill is her usual vibrant self in everything from the opening "Morning" to the closing "Danube So Blue." Featured is Kevin Scott, who was the young male lead in the London productions of Fanny and Flower Drum Song. This is an abundantly melodic score, with several easily recognizable tunes.
The other half of this CD is devoted to A Waltz Dream, which had its premiere as Ein Walzertraum in Vienna in 1907. With music by Oscar Straus, it was the first major Viennese operetta hit after The Merry Widow. It concerned a Viennese lieutenant, married to a princess but attempting to escape the pressures of life at court, assisted by a female orchestra conductor who ultimately gets the hero back on the royal track.
A Waltz Dream opened at New York's Broadway Theatre in 1908, and, with 111 performances, was not the success it had been abroad. London also saw it in 1908, but with new lyrics by Adrian Ross, and, as was the case with Waltzes from Vienna, this recording employs the British version of the text. A Hollywood film version was called The Smiling Lieutenant and co-starred Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert.
A Waltz Dream features another charming score. Outstanding are the title song; "That's the Life for Me" for the orchestra girl; and the female trio "Temperament." And the 1960 Waltzes from Vienna and Waltz Dream recordings are heard complete on this CD.