| re: "Soliloquy" from the new Carousel recording | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 08:37 pm EDT 08/06/24 | |
| In reply to: re: "Soliloquy" from the new Carousel recording - GrumpyMorningBoy 11:42 am EDT 08/06/24 | |
|
|
|
| GMB, you may know that Rodgers was extremely, exceptionally insistent on his music being sung exactly as he wrote it. Not just every note but every rhythm had to be exactly as he wrote it. That's why it was so ridiculous when the guy who played Curly in the Fish Oklahoma! said in an interview that Rodgers would have loved how they performed the music in that production. He obviously knew nothing about how Rodgers felt about liberties being taken with his music. Anyway, since you brought up Kelli O'Hara, in The King and I she did two things that bothered me. She did what everyone nowadays seems to do in "Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?" She did not stay in rhythm when Anna corrects her accidental rhyming. It's been some time since I've heard an Anna live or on recordings who does it as it was written. They all worry it to death. O'Hara was not nearly as bad in this respect as some others have been, but I don't get why actresses, directors and musical directors nowadays seem to think that Anna cannot immediately hear what she's done and immediately correct herself. It's like they're all trying to be misguidedly naturalistic when, in fact, the way it was written to be done is just as believable as what seems to always be done nowadays. In fact, maybe it's more believable as written. I don't think any of these more recent Annas are better actresses than Gertrude Lawrence probably was or than Deborah Kerr was, but Lawrence and Kerr didn't feel they had to do what you almost always hear nowadays. (Yes, the number was not in the movie as released, but it was recorded and filmed, and it's on the soundtrack album, and Kerr recorded that opening section herself. You probably know all that but sometimes I feel the need to forestall certain comments that I can anticipate possibly coming.) Nor did Barbara Cook or Constance Towers worry those moments to death. Yet even someone as old-school as Julia McKenzie messed around with it — in fact, possibly worse than anyone else I've ever heard — when she played Anna on a low-budget studio-cast King and I recording some years back (although much later than the Annas I mentioned who do those moments as they were written). The other thing O'Hara did musically that bothered me, and again I hear this done wrong a lot nowadays (although this seems to have started more recently than the "Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?" thing), is that there were places in "Hello, Young Lovers" where she did not sing the right rhythms. She kept smoothing out the rhythms. There are sections where longer and shorter notes alternate, and often nowadays you don't get that in those sections. And Marin Mazzie did the same thing, and even more so. When Renee Fleming sang it at the Barbara Cook memorial, she did it that way, too. As with "Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?", if you listen to older recordings, the singers almost always do the rhythms right. Although I was surprised just now when I listened to some of the older recordings to hear that Barbara Cook smoothed out some of the rhythms in "Hello, Young Lovers." Not as much as I sometimes hear nowadays, but a bit. Ashley Park has some sense of period style, and she's a fine actress, but I think Rodgers would not have allowed her to be cast in any major production of The King and I because in the higher parts of "My Lord and Master" her singing sounded raw and she almost seemed to be screaming some of the notes, not as a dramatic choice but because that was the only way she could sing them. It's too bad because she acted the song very well both live and on the cast recording and her singing is fine until she gets to the higher parts (and it's not like it goes all that high). |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | re: "Soliloquy" from the new Carousel recording - GrumpyMorningBoy 11:42 am EDT 08/06/24 |
| Next: | re: "Soliloquy" from the new Carousel recording - GrumpyMorningBoy 07:58 pm EDT 08/09/24 |
| Thread: |
|
Time to render: 0.019457 seconds.