Marc Blitzstein Presents His Theatre Compositions

This post of Marc Blitzstein discussing his theatre works and presenting excerpts with some well-known performers was requested by a reader following my recent reupload of an obscure Blitzstein LP of recordings from 1946.

First cover

This particular album comes from May 1956, and was the first in a series originally on Westminister’s Spoken Arts imprint intended to inaugurate a Distinguished Composers Series.

At the time, Blitzstein was to have less than eight years to live, and never achieved a success to rival his earlier works, the politically committed musical plays The Cradle Will Rock and No for An Answer, and the opera Regina, adapted from Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, all of which are discussed and excerpted here.

The composer was nonetheless an important figure in the American musical theatre, one who had a strong effect on other luminaries. When you hear his voice on this record, you may be struck (as I was) with the similarity of his presentation with the familiar eloquence and urbanity of Leonard Bernstein. That is probably not a coincidence. Bernstein was much taken with Blitzstein, organizing and leading a production of The Cradle Will Rock when the younger artist was still an undergraduate at Harvard.

Orson Welles, similarly, was highly impressed by Blitzstein when Welles was directing The Cradle Will Rock as a precocious 22 year old. Welles recalled many years later, “When he came into the room, the lights got brighter . . . He was an engine, a rocket directed in one direction which was his opera – which he almost believed had only to be performed to start the Revolution.”

The Cradle Will Rock production photo, with Blitzstein at the piano,
Howard Da Silva and Olive Stanton

While The Cradle Will Rock did not spark a second American Revolution, it was widely and perhaps surprisingly well received and reviewed despite the radical politics it espoused. Developed through the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project, the play never appeared under its auspices. The conjunction of the play’s leftist views and significant labor unrest at the time of its impending premiere led the government to declare a moratorium on new theatre productions that was plainly aimed at shutting down The Cradle Will Rock.

As clumsy censorship often does, the effect was to turn the play’s production into a cause célèbre that Blitzstein, Welles and producer John Houseman turned to their advantage in ways both ingenious and fortuitous. The composer tells the tale of its unusual premiere on this record. The unconventional staging that resulted, with Blitzstein on stage at the piano and the performers appearing from the audience, was highly influential.

This is not to say that the music itself is without precedent. You will not get very far into Blitzstein’s oeuvre without the names Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht coming to mind, and indeed today Blitzstein is best remembered for his translation and adaptation of the Weill-Brecht version of The Threepenny Opera. The composer himself was at pains to say that his works had many other influences than the expressionists, and it is only fair to observe that his songs have their own powerful atmosphere. On this record, “Francie” is highly affecting and even “Penny Candy,” while not in the least to my taste, is decidedly well done.

Evelyn Lear

A few words about the performers on this record.

The well-known soprano Evelyn Lear made her recording debut on this record. In 1955, newly graduated from Juilliard, she created the role of Nina in Blitzstein's Reuben Reuben. George Gaynes also was in the cast of that failed musical, among many other Broadway productions and, in later years, television shows.

Brenda Lewis and Blitzstein

Brenda Lewis was another distinguished soprano who first had a success on Broadway as Birdie in the original 1949 production of Regina. She sings “Birdie’s Aria” here. Lewis later moved on to the title role, assuming it in the complete 1958 recording of the work.

Joshua Shelley, blacklisted by the movie studios in the early 1950s, appeared on stage until resuming a Hollywood career in the 1970s.

Theatre and club performer Jane Connell appeared in Blitzstein’s production of The Threepenny Opera.

Alvin Epstein had a very long and distinguished career in the theatre as actor and director. At about the time of this recording, he was on Broadway with Orson Welles in King Lear.

In addition to the transfer of this Blitzstein record, I have included links to my remastered version of the cast recording of No for An Answer. This comes from an LP reissue that suffered from substandard sound, which I have done my best to rectify. The original transfer predates this blog.

Mendelssohn Special with Kletzki, Szell, Barbirolli, Borries and Celibidache

Rummaging through my collection a while back, I came across several interesting discs with the music of Felix Mendelssohn, and decided to transfer them for this post, and possibly one more to come.

Here are the details of today’s offering. The sound quality varies, but is never less than good.

Symphony No. 3 (Israel Philharmonic/Paul Kletzki). This particular record was among the first to be made by the orchestra, dating from April/May 1954. The download includes scans of an eight-page commemorative booklet included in the American Angel release. Kletzki leads a good performance, although the coda, marked Allegro maestoso assai, is more maestoso than allegro.

Symphony No. 4 (Hallé Orchestra/John Barbirolli) and Violin Concerto (Siegfried Borries; Berlin Philharmonic/Sergiu Celibidache). This coupling on RCA Victor’s Bluebird budget label combined Manchester and Berlin sessions that both transpired in February 1948. Barbirolli elicits a spruce performance from the resuscitated Hallé, which remained underpowered in the strings five years after the conductor revived its fortunes. Siegfried Borries, then the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, offers an assured reading of the concerto, with an excellent accompaniment led by Celibidache during his postwar years as the orchestra’s conductor.

Symphony No. 4 (Cleveland Orchestra/George Szell) and Music from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Philharmonic-Symphony of New York/Szell). The fine Cleveland performance is from November 1947 dates in Severance Hall; the terrific New York rendition of the Midsummer Night’s Dream music is from January 1951 and Columbia’s 30th Street studio. I don’t like making comparisons, but for me the New York band of this period was second to none. This particular coupling had two different covers, both of which are in the download along with images from a 78 set and 10-inch LP.

If there is interest, I will transfer Mendelssohn overtures from Adrian Boult and Midsummer Night’s Dream excerpts from Sargent and Old Vic forces including Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann and Stanley Holloway.

George Szell blisses out to a 1951 recording session playback

Dinah Shore on Columbia

Dinah Shore has often graced this blog, but I have never devoted a post solely to her single output for the Columbia label from 1946-50. This post starts with an early 10-inch LP descriptively titled Dinah Shore Sings, and continues with 14 other sides transferred from 78s in my collection.

1946 magazine cover

Shore was among the favorite female vocalists of the era, and this set shows why – while technically she is not the most accomplished of singers, she was among the warmest, sharing honors with Perry Como among the males.

The collection provides a good survey of her recorded repertoire of the time, especially current show tunes from hits such as Kiss Me, Kate (she is too sincere for “Always True to You in My Fashion” but just right for “So in Love”) and songs from films such as The Time, the Place and the Girl (the excellent “A Rainy Night in Rio” and “Through a Thousand Dreams” from Dietz and Schwartz) and The Perils of Pauline (“Poppa, Don’t Preach to Me” from Frank Loesser).

Columbia also liked to pair her with other singers. This blog has previously featured her duo LP with Buddy Clark, and she also recorded with Doris Day and Jack Smith. Perhaps inspired by Capitol’s success with Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, the label sent her to the studios with a parade of country artists, including Gene Autry and George Morgan. This collection includes two sides with the relatively obscure Dusty Walker, who was on radio and television in Southern California and on the Columbia artist rolls for a few years. It also has her sole outing backed by Western swing artist Spade Cooley, a good if predictable song called “Heartaches, Sadness and Tears,” but Dinah just can’t evoke the desolate quality it needs.

Columbia favored Shore with a pre-LP album called Torch Songs in 1947, with the type of commercial blues songs she featured early in her career, when she was on radio’s "Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street.” I only have one of the two 78s in the set (a coupling of “St. Louis Blues” and “Tess’s Torch Song”), but have included it in the download along with scans of the album artwork, including the delightful inside spread shown below (click to enlarge).

The sound on all these items is quite good.

Mozart Concertos from Rosina Lhévinne

I thought I might follow up the Ania Dorfmann and Maryla Jonas posts with a selection of the recordings of another lesser-known woman pianist, Rosina Lhévinne.

Lhévinne made very few appearances in the recording studio and was principally known in her lifetime for being a noted piano teacher, with pupils including Van Cliburn and John Browning, as well as for being the wife of pianist Josef Lhévinne. The few items that were captured, however, show her to be a first-rate artist.

Rosina Bessie was a promising piano student in Moscow when she met Josef Lhévinne, marrying him soon after her 1898 graduation from the Conservatory, and quickly abandoning any career as a solo performer, although she did engage in duo-piano works with Josef. The pair came to the US following the World War, and they joined the Juilliard faculty several years later. Josef died in 1944.

The Lhévinnes only made two recordings together, to my knowledge – Debussy’s “Fêtes” and a Mozart sonata, both in the 1930s.

Today’s LPs include the first record that Rosina made following Josef’s death, a November 1947 rendition of Mozart’s Concerto for Three Pianos K.242, where she is joined by the duo-pianists Vitya Vronsky and Victor Babin, and accompanied by the Little Orchestra Society and conductor Thomas Scherman, in a recording from Liederkranz Hall. The transfer is from an early Columbia LP that also includes Vronsky and Babin in a showy version of Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos K.365 with the Robin Hood Dell Orchestra and Dimitri Mitropoulos. The latter dates from September 1945. The sound on both is good. Strangely, Columbia bills Rosina Lhévinne only as “Lhévinne” on the LP cover.

Jean Morel

Rosina is heard to best advantage, however, in today’s second album, recorded in May 1960 to mark her 80th birthday. This is a superior account of Mozart’s Concerto No. 21 in which she sounds just as youthful as the students in the accompanying Juilliard Orchestra (I suspect the ensemble also included faculty), led by Jean Morel, another famed teacher. (Vronsky and Babin also were instructors, and were on the Cleveland Institute of Music faculty for many years – Babin was the director of the school.) The sound from Columbia’s 30th Street Studio is as vibrant as the artistry. That is Josef Lhévinne’s portrait over Rosina’s shoulder on the LP cover up top.

I also have the Lhévinnes’ version of “Fêtes” and Rosina’s 1961 Chopin Concerto No. 1 if there is interest.