| re: Any more comments on The Day Before Spring at the York? | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 08:43 pm EST 02/16/19 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 08:39 pm EST 02/16/19 | |
| In reply to: re: Any more comments on The Day Before Spring at the York? - kieran 07:21 pm EST 02/16/19 | |
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| Using the original production's conductor's score found by Dominic McHugh, a concert was done in England a couple of years ago that employed a reconstruction of the original orchestrations, based on the instrumental cues in that score. It would be nice to have those orchestrations used if a recording is done. I'm told they sounded fantastic. I'm linking an article on that concert. I saw Mufti's previous production, which was done before McHugh found the conductor's score, and a certain amount of guesswork was involved the putting the score together for that production. I read that this Mufti was only 90 minutes, which would mean a great deal of cutting was done to the book and perhaps some was also done to the score. I know that the director did revise the script for this production. I'm guessing that little of the extensive dance music was used, which makes sense under the circumstances. Much as I would love a recording of the score, which has lots of wonderful music, I'd sort of hate to have happen what happened when Mufti's Billion Dollar Baby was recorded. That remains the best Mufti I've seen, but the recording is disappointing. They added a few musicians, and created a small orchestration for the recording, but still most of the dance music — again, a show that had a lot of dance — was missing, and the small orchestration really is not what I want to hear again and again. It's better than nothing, but I wonder if it makes another recording less likely. It remains sad to me that Comden, Green and the Morton Gould estate did not chip in to make a really thorough recording happen using the orchestrations. It would have been expensive, but these things don't cost millions, and I'd think it would have been feasible, if complicated and not cheap. Gould's daughter was at the performance I attended. She spoke at the talkback afterward, and she seemed quite pleased. Comden and Green were also closely involved in the production, making some revisions for it. I think both shows are perhaps too problematic and perhaps too little-known for Encores! to ever do, though I'd love to be wrong about that, if only because I would love to hear both scores performed with full orchestra and to have recordings with full orchestrations. At the talkback for the Mufti Billion Dollar Baby, original cast member Danny Daniels said that whenever he wasn't onstage, he would be in the pit so he could hear the orchestrations, which he thought were fantastic, up close. The original BDB orchestrations seem to exist, unlike the Day Before Spring for which a reconstruction had to be done that undoubtedly is not 100-percent correct, but may be the closest we will ever get. Fortunately, there are already recordings of most of the Day Before Spring songs. It does seem that the Loewe estate is concerned about having good recordings made and is willing to put in money for recordings, so perhaps I can hope that if this production does lead to a recording, the orchestrations used in Sheffield might be employed (expensive though it would be to do that). |
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| Link | Day Before Spring concert |
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