Every day we post 10 new Classical CD and DVD reviews. A free weekly summary is available by e-mail. MusicWeb is not a subscription site. To keep it free please purchase discs through our links.

Frederick LOEWE (1901-1988)
With librettist Alan Jay LERNER (1918-1986)
Orchestral Selections from: My Fair Lady (1956); Camelot (1960); Gigi (1958); Brigadoon (1947); Paint your Wagon (1951)
Richard Hayman and his Orchestra
Rec. November 1989 and May 1990 DDD
NAXOS 8.555015 [63.53]

BUY NOW 

AmazonUK   AmazonUS

The collaboration Lerner & Loewe is associated as much with the cinema as the stage. Their success started in 1945 with their second musical The Day before Spring and more so with the show that followed, Brigadoon. They went on to produce some of the finest 20^th Century musicals of which My Fair Lady is the best remembered. Their last show, Camelot, worked well on the screen, given the added attraction of stars like Richard Burton and Julie Andrews. But its demand for spectacular sets meant that its transfer to the stage was not so successful and amateur groups equally found it difficult to promote the musical.

Here we have a series of orchestral selections from the shows, probably taken from the Chappell orchestral selections. However, there is evidence that the scoring has been adjusted, with different instruments playing the usual lines and new decoration added to give more lustre.

The orchestra to some of the items is somewhat muddy, and I don’t think that the heavy use of a euphonium/tuba in unison with bass drum adds anything attractive to the My Fair Lady selection. In this piece the orchestration is too heavy and more sensitive use of dynamics to give a contrasting lightness would have been welcomed. The other pieces have more attractive moments.

Of Richard Hayman, he may be remembered for his recordings with Mercury Records. As an arranger he has scored for films and television and was chief arranger for the Boston Pops Orchestra under Arthur Fiedler.

The notes in English, German and French cover good background material on the collaborators and their shows.

Raymond Walker

Return to Index