Classical Broadway
Classical Works by Broadway Composers

* Coleman: New York Sketches (1)
* Strouse:
   - String Quartet (2)
   - Sonata for 2 Pianos (3)
* Kander: 3 Poems by Lucile Adler (4)
* Schmidt: Monteargentario: 7 Dances for Solo Piano (5)

(1) Seth Rudetsky (piano)
(2) Korngold Quartet
(3) Emily Witt & Scott Woolley (pianos)
(4) Carol Vaness (soprano), Warren Jones (piano)
(5) Harvey Schmidt (piano)
Bay Cities BCD 1038 Total time: 66:07

Summary for the Busy Executive: Things look swell. Things look great.

Ever since Victor Herbert at least, people have dreamed of marriages
between classical and American vernacular music to give birth to something
new, rich, and strange. Gershwin, Ellington, Weill, Rodgers, and Bernstein
- to name only five - have each attracted such hopes in their turn,
creating both popular song "standards" and something close to Mozartean
Singspiel. In fact, however, many classical musicians have turned a nice
dollar on Broadway, even if many have chosen to hide their classical
roots.

Cy Coleman (Wildcat, Little Me, Sweet Charity, On the Twentieth Century,
The Will Rogers Follies) began as a piano prodigy. In the Forties, a
publisher asked him for some piano music that sounded like Gershwin.
Coleman obliged with New York Sketches, a suite of three character pieces:
"Morning," "Afternoon," and "Evening." It's more Gershwinesque than
Gershwin - less focused than the real thing. Come to think of it, a lot
of composers, particularly in the Hollywood of the time, wrote this kind
of stuff.  Think of Franz Waxman's score to The Philadelphia Story. On
its own, Coleman's little suite has its attractions. The piano writing
is assured and varied.  He makes use of the entire keyboard. However,
despite the enjoyments of the moment, you really do forget it five minutes
later.  Seth Rudetsky, the pianist in this performance, does Coleman no
favors with an arthritic, unimaginative reading. This music should seduce
like Debussy.

John Kander (Flora the Red Menace, Cabaret, Zorba, and the Broadway show
and current hit movie Chicago), at one time apparently Liza Minnelli's
house composer, attended Oberlin. The CD offers a set of art songs to
texts by Kander's Kansas City compatriot, Lucile Adler. Adler's poems
chronicle the death of her husband. If you know only Kander's pop ditties
(and, to my regret, I do), these three will surprise you. The idiom for
the first two songs derives from such folks as Britten, Rorem, and Holst
(the Twelve Songs), while the last is straight out of another Kansas
City eminence - Virgil Thomson. While the songs lack an obvious
individuality, it nevertheless takes a great deal of talent to pull
imitations like this off, and the songs are beautiful in their own right.
The vocal writing is effective, the piano writing expert. Carol Vaness
lacks the flexibility of a real Lieder singer, but within an essentially
operatic mode sings with great expressiveness. Both she and Kander deliver
the goods in the climactic third song (which the composer describes as
"very Midwestern").

Yes, dear reader, I too have seen The Fantasticks, and more than once.
My favorite part was always the opening for two pianos, drum kit, and
(I dimly recall) bass. Harvey Schmidt also wrote music for 110 in the
Shade, I Do! I Do! (my favorite of his shows), and Celebration. The piano
suite Monteargentario shares the same bright insouciance of the Fantasticks
opening. In spots, it reminded me of some of Poulenc's more Satiean piano
music, not in anything like conscious or direct appropriation, but in
its high spirits and its genuine eagerness to charm. Schmidt himself
plays these little gems with affection and gusto.

If I hadn't been told that Charles Strouse trained as a classical
composer, I yet might have guessed. I saw the original Broadway production
of Bye Bye Birdie with Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera, and the opening
number, "The Telephone Hour," bowled me over with its witty play on the
cliched riffs of white Fifties rock 'n' roll. It wasn't a song, but an
honest-to-Betsy compos ition, going well beyond the structural limits
of the usual Broadway song.  Strouse has had his hits and misses since:
Golden Boy, Applause, Annie. My favorite of his shows, Superman, closed
all too quickly, and I know it only from the cast album. At any rate,
Strouse numbers among his teachers Boulanger, Copland, and Arthur Berger,
and, boy, it shows. Strouse's offerings are undoubtedly the most
accomplished, the least awkward, and the most individual pieces on the
program. They need no special pleading. An adventurous string quartet
or duo-piano team would do well to look them up.  Behind these pieces
are New York jazz of the late Forties and early Fifties.  Both Coleman
and Strouse played jazz in New York clubs before making their mark in
musicals.  Strouse was a lot less casual than Coleman about his appropriation
of jazz. He gave it conscious thought in assembling his musical materia
and in his translation to string quartet, a genre with few convincing
jazz examples. The first movement moves in a jittery swing - somewhere
between hard bop and Bernstein's jazz evocations in On the Town.  The
slow second movement is a mood piece closer to Alban Berg than to American
neoclassicism.  But even here, you can catch a kind of searching, twisting
line, reminiscent of the slow solos of saxophone players taking choruses
of "Sophisticated Lady." The skittish finale seems to me the least overtly
jazz-influenced and the most Coplandian, although (as with Copland) the
rhythms probably wouldn't have occurred to someone who hadn't heard jazz.
The Korngold Quartet turns in a fine account.

The Sonata for 2 Pianos is, quite simply, a knockout, very much in
the manner of examples by Stravinsky and Poulenc, although without the
Stravinskian architectural weight. In compensation, the work offers a
gorgeous, though not necessarily delicate lyricism. Handsome sonorities,
true contrapuntal independence of the two players - both declare Strouse's
considerable composing chops. As far as I know (the liner notes don't
make it clear), this is Strouse's last concert work. I know he needs to
earn a living, but maybe when he retires, he can return to his classical
roots. The first movement seems the most complex, the slow second
beautifully singing, although each player sings his own tune. The mercurial
scherzo reminds me of Foss's neoclassic brilliance, especially his piano
writing in something like the cantata Behold! I Build an House. Strouse
by the time he had gotten around to writing this movement had already
begun to work in popular theater, and the scherzo and finale reflect "a
looser mindset." Certainly, the canonic writing of the first movement,
the contrapuntally distinct lines of the second, and the thematic concision
of both appear less evident in the last two movements. Nevertheless, the
finale builds considerable momentum on its way to a substantial close.
Pianists Emily Witt and Scot Woolley give the music its due, never
over-inflating, giving way to one another in the complicated little dance
of steps forward and back dictated by Strouse's music. Sensitive,
musicianly playing.

I don't know the sources for obtaining this CD. I got mine from Berkshire
Record Outlet: www.berkshirerecordoutlet.com.

Steve Schwartz