The following was not not included in “Recording Broadway – A Life in Cast Albums”
From Chapter 25:
Turned-On Broadway (1982)/Turned-On Broadway, Vol. II (1982).
In 1982 the disco craze was still ongoing, and Luther Henderson and I decided that it couldn’t hurt to get in on the action. So Luther put together a series of dance medleys of Broadway hits and arranged them in a fine disco frenzy, conducting his “Broadway Symphony Orchestra,” which was simply a pick-up group hired for the occasion. We called the album Turned-On Broadway.
The eight tracks included “Ballads on Broadway,” “Rock Down Broadway,” “Waltzes on Broadway,” “Broadway Latin” and even “Henderson and Sullivan,” a disco-charged medley of Gilbert & Sullivan songs. Not one tune sounded at all the way its composer had intended. Nothing Luther did could be devoid of charm and musicianship, and I daresay that, for what it was, Turned-On Broadway was excellent work. I wasn’t the target audience, though, and as far as I was concerned it was of arguable artistic merit.
The recording proved successful enough that, later that year, we got the band back together for Vol. II. It was neither better nor worse than its predecessor, but disco was waning and there was no Vol. III.
From Chapter 32;
A Digital Trip Down Broadway (1987).
A Broadway Extravaganza (1987).
These two albums were released separately, but were parts of the same project, recorded at the same sessions by the same conductor, orchestrator and orchestra, and featuring the same subtitle, “Symphonic Recollections.”
Follies in Concert was now a year in the past, but its echoes lingered in my mind, and in various ways it informed many things that I would do over the next decade or so.
In this case, what lingered was the joy of hearing Steve’s brilliant score played by a world-class symphonic ensemble, the New York Philharmonic. It’s no disparagement of the original Follies orchestra or the original orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick to say that hearing the score played by the Philharmonic made me (and, I think, many other people) hear it in a whole new light. And it made me want to hear other Broadway music the same way.
The inspiration for this particular project was a detail of Steve’s score for Anyone Can Whistle that I had noticed somewhere along the line, something that even Steve himself may never have noticed. There is a musical phrase in the title song (the words are “Everybody says don’t”) which is identical to a musical phrase in Gershwin’s An American in Paris. The pieces are very different, but this particular passage is identical.
I had noticed this years earlier, but in 1987 it occurred to me that it might be possible to use that passage as a bridge to combine these two composers in a single suite. The idea of pairing Sondheim and Gershwin was offbeat, because they’re from different eras and are quite different as composers. Once I started thinking about the idea of combining different Broadway composers in a single suite, though, it seemed like this might be a way of recording Broadway music in a symphonic style—not simply reorchestrating a given show for symphonic accompaniment, but writing symphonic music that draws on Broadway themes. You could make an album of such pieces, or even more than one album.
The theme of both of these albums is pairings, some of them obvious—Rodgers & Hart songs with Rodgers & Hammerstein songs, for example—and others less so, such as Gershwin and Sondheim. And as soon as I started thinking about this, I knew that there were two partners that I’d want to have for this project.
Thanks to Follies in Concert, Paul Gemignani was arguably the world’s greatest and most experienced conductor of a fusion of Broadway and symphonic music. I thought he’d be intrigued by my new project, and I was right. Having just worked with Paul and the Royal Philharmonic on Carousel, the idea of returning to them for this project seemed natural.
Even more important was to have the right orchestrator. Jonathan Tunick’s intimate familiarity with Follies and with Steve’s music in general had made him the natural choice to “translate” the Follies score into a symphonic context. For this “Symphonic Recollections” project, though, I needed somebody who was as comfortable with half a century of Broadway music as Jonathan was with the Sondheim repertoire, someone who also had practical experience in scoring popular music for symphonic performance.
The first and only name that occurred to me was Luther Henderson. One of the pleasures of a project you’ve initiated yourself is the chance to involve people you enjoy working with, and through more than a quarter-century Luther and I had collaborated on any number of enjoyable projects.
I first met him in 1960, when he did the arrangements for Let Me Entertain You, an album of burlesque songs by Sandra Church, who at the time was starring on Broadway as the original Louise, aka Gypsy Rose Lee, in Gypsy. Howard Scott was producing it and I was at the sessions basically to watch and learn, helping out however I could. I was deeply impressed with Luther, whom I knew was also one of the favorite arrangers of conductor André Kostelanetz, another one of Howard’s artists.
After that, Luther kept popping up in my life for the next 30 or 40 years. Among other things, we shared a lyricist—Charles Burr, with whom I worked for many years, also wrote with Luther. And whenever there was a project that seemed to me to cry out for something unusual or unique, I always went to Luther. The combination of his niceness and his talent was irresistible.
One of my fondest memories from this period is of the time he and I spent talking through the “Symphonic Recollections” idea and brainstorming about what might be included in it and what kind of connections we might draw between the selections. With all of Broadway to choose from, it took some time to figure things out, but it was a lot of fun. We sat around the dining-room table of his apartment at the Parc Vendôme on West 57th Street, and bounced ideas off each other for hours, and it was a wonderful experience—maybe the best part of the whole project.
It was very much a collaboration. I came in with a great deal of material that I was eager to use, and Luther had some ideas of his own, but the idea of pairings was a fresh one, and a lot of what we each started out wanting to use isn’t on the records. It’s hard for me even to say which ideas were his and which were mine, because we both had some degree of input on everything. I know that it was Luther’s idea to pair “Carousel Waltz” with “Wait Till You See Her,” for example, and he came up with the nice geographical combination of “Manhattan” and “Oklahoma.”
I was very comfortable with Luther. We’d worked together for many years, and it wasn’t just that we liked each other—we also had similar tastes and, where our tastes were different, we each understood the other guy’s inclinations. Luther was very enthusiastic about it all, of course, because he’d had very few opportunities to write for a symphony orchestra. I think his only major previous symphonic work had been some arrangements of Duke Ellington songs. So this gave him a chance to really expand his tonal palette, with not only a much greater number of instruments, but a greater variety—particularly in the percussion section.
The chance to explore that broader palette was very welcome to him, and he did wonderful things with it. The arrangements for these albums are fabulous, full of elegant, unexpected details—but I’d looked for nothing less from Luther.
Once we’d worked out what the basic material was going to be, though, my job was done, at least in this area. (I did still need to record it!) I stepped aside and let Luther do what he wanted to. I have a big ego and enjoy feeling responsible for a lot of things, but at the same time you have to know when to leave people alone. You plant an idea in their heads, and bravo for that—but then, to a large degree, you have to let them run with it.
A Digital Trip Down Broadway includes “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story, followed by two tracks that together are called “The British Are Coming,” and feature songs from Me and My Girl and Les Misérables (the latter of which is, of course, French, but it did come to America via London). Next is “The Hart and Hammerstein by Rodgers Suite,” and then another two-track selection called “The Cole Porter Suite,” which brings together seven different Porter songs. The album wraps up with “The Jule Styne Suite,” a two-track merging of seven Styne songs.
A Broadway Extravaganza features “The Andrew Lloyd Webber Suite,” which has selections from four of his shows. “The Harold Arlen Suite” includes seven different Arlen songs which, like the Webber selections, were written with several different lyricists. Luther called the next one “The Quelque Chose Suite,” because it’s just a bunch of nice things that don’t have any particular relationship to one another. The second of the three tracks, “The Buttercup Willow Affair,” is a very cute track that’s dear to my heart because it’s the only occasion I’ve had, in a 60-year career, to record my beloved Gilbert & Sullivan in any form. And then the album concludes with “The Sondheim/Gershwin Suite,” which featured three interesting pairings, including the title song from Anyone Can Whistle and “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”
Barbara Cook: The Disney Album (1988).
As any reader of this book knows, I’ve always loved Barbara Cook. She could be a bit stroppy sometimes—in fact, some wag said of her, “Watch out, every once in a while you get Cooked!”—but we had a very cordial relationship. We had a long history together, beginning with the early-1960s studio albums of Show Boat and The King and I.
So, when I found myself at MCA and with plenty of room to develop my own projects, I wanted to do something more with Barbara—not just a studio-cast album like Carousel, but something that would be really oddball and, ideally, also very commercial. Knowing the audience for Broadway albums fairly well by then, I tried to put myself in the place of a typical Broadway-record buyer and ask myself, “Show recordings aside, what kind of album would really tickle my fancy?”
And I answered myself, “How about an album of Barbara Cook singing Walt Disney songs? That’s just got to be a natural!”
Having just done Carousel with Barbara, I was pretty well acquainted with her manager, Jerry Kravitz, so I called him and explained what I wanted to do, and he took it to Barbara … who wasn’t particularly interested and told him to tell me no. Jerry was a smart guy, though, and saw the potential in what I was talking about. When Barbara said no, he said to her, “You’ve got to be crazy.”
He couldn’t talk her into it, but he did convince her to present the idea to Wally Harper, her longtime music director and her chief source of musical and emotional support. When she asked Wally, who was also a smart guy, he said, “It’s a great idea.” So Barbara said yes.
There were more than a half-century of Disney songs to choose from, even in 1988, with the flowering of latter-day Disney musicals that began with The Little Mermaid still a year in the future. The album as it emerged reflected my ideas, but also those of Wally and, of course, Barbara herself. We didn’t work together on this—I gave them my ideas, and then they sorted out what they wanted to do.
There were a few things I knew I wanted, such as “Someday My Prince Will Come,” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Another Snow White song, “With a Smile and a Song,” was something Barbara wanted to do, and I thought it would make a good opening for the album, a nice way to introduce all the other songs. I also suggested “I’m Late, I’m Late” from Alice in Wonderland, three favorites from Dumbo, and of course “When You Wish Upon a Star.”
Barbara’s choices included “Lavender Blue,” from So Dear to My Heart, was Barbara’s choice, along with “Someone’s Waiting for You,” from The Rescuers, and two songs from Song of the South. I think she also suggested “The Second Star to the Right,” from Peter Pan.
Wally Harper made all of the arrangements and medleys. I had wanted Luther Henderson to do the orchestrations, and Wally was fine with that, since he and Luther were very good friends. Luther turned out to be otherwise committed, though, so Wally recommended a guy named Mack Schlefer, and sent me some samples of Schlefer’s work, which I liked very much. He ended up doing the orchestrations for the album, and they were very good.
We had fun with Dumbo’s “When I See an Elephant Fly.” Barbara decided that she wanted to do it as a trio, like the Andrews Sisters, with her doing all three voices. That was fine with me, and it gave me a chance to indulge my great love for anagrams: On the album’s back cover the song is credited to Barbara Nelle Cook, which was Barbara’s full name, along with Boreala Carbonkle and Leona Blabcroaker, both anagrams of “Barbara Nelle Cook.”
The hardest thing to hit upon, I think, was the ending for Dumbo’s “Pink Elephants on Parade.” In the movie it’s not a conventional song, but rather a relatively short vocal passage thrown into the middle of a big, psychedelic production number, an animated dream sequence that, of course, we couldn’t capture on the recording, even if we wanted to. We tried several different endings, and finally settled on one in which Barbara kind of fades out at the end, exhausted by all the excitement. I think it was just right for the song.
It was an exciting album to make, because Barbara was so goddam good. She sounded just wonderful. The reason she hadn’t wanted to do the album initially was that she felt that there wasn’t enough meat in these songs—meaning, I guess, that these songs, written mainly for children, didn’t have enough subtext. And it’s true, these songs are very simple and direct in their lyrics, and she liked more complicated material. But she really got inside these songs and, when all was said and done, I think she was enormously pleased that she’d done this recording.
And then I almost sabotaged the whole thing, because sometimes I don’t know when to stop talking. I was on the phone with Barbara, about a week after the recording session, and for some reason I said, “You know, this is really my first pop album.”
In a sense, of course, that wasn’t true at all. I’ve done popular stuff all along, and almost every Broadway score is basically popular music. What I meant was that this was the first time I’d done what many pop producers do—come up with an idea for an album and engaged a singer to record it. I was excited about that and, without even thinking about it, I shared that excitement with Barbara.
It scared the hell out of her. She said, “Well, if you’ve never mixed a pop record before, I don’t want you mixing this one.”
So I had to backtrack fast. I said, “No, no, no, no! I’ve done many similar things. I’ve just never done a solo act like this before!” The conversation got a little bit unpleasant, I’m sorry to say—I got Cooked, as the wag said!—but, thankfully, I managed to calm her down. It was a disconcerting moment—but obviously there was never any chance that I wasn’t going to mix this album, which was my brainchild in the first place. And soon enough things were fine between us.
In the end, it’s a superb album. The arrangements are beautiful, Wally was a wonderful conductor and the whole experience was a positive one. And it sold very well. I’d known from the beginning, when I originally had the idea, that it was a winner, and I was right.
Unfortunately, by then I’d discovered the flaw in my MCA contract, which otherwise was a very good one. According to the contract, my royalties as a producer were paid not on the basis of each individual album’s sales, but on an aggregate of all the albums I’d made in a given period, classical, Broadway and otherwise. This meant that, instead of each recording beginning to pay royalties as soon as it earned back its costs, none would pay royalties until all of the others had also earned back their costs. This means that even one failure, even on an album which was targeted at a niche market and unlikely to make money, would ensure that none of the albums in that period would ever pay royalties. So I never saw a penny royalty from The Disney Album. Even so, I look back on it warmly.
Among those who were satisfied with it was the notoriously strict Disney organization. All the songs had been published before, so there was no problem with getting the rights to record them (simple rights, since we weren’t telling the stories of the movies!). But I’d been warned that Disney was very particular about how their iconic images were used, so we’d have to be careful that our album cover didn’t use any of their actual art—the movie cels, publicity posters and so forth. I was advised that the way to avoid this kind of problem would be to send somebody down to Times Square to buy some of those cheap Disney figurines and take a cover photo with Barbara sitting at a desk with a lot of those figurines.
Well, I’m all in favor of avoiding wrangling with lawyers, but I didn’t want a cheap-looking cover. After all, this was Barbara Cook! I wanted the real cartoons, Pinocchio, Snow White, Dumbo and the others.
So I reached out to the Disney office in California to get permission to use the actual cartoons, and at first they weren’t the least bit enthusiastic. But I stuck with it and somehow or other, after a few days or weeks of back-and-forth, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. Eventually they sent us cartoon art to choose from and said, “OK, just let us see the cover when it’s done.”
So we put together a cover with a beautiful picture of Barbara, set against a starry background and surrounded by six cartoon drawings of characters from Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo, Pinocchio and Snow White. We sent it to the Disney office, and they had no problem with it.
There was a nice postscript, too: Only a couple of months ago, when I was going through some of my papers, I came across something I’d almost forgotten, a letter from someone at Disney saying how much they loved the album and how pleased they were to be associated with it. That was good to read, back then and now.
Sarah Brightman: The Songs that Got Away (1989).
In late 2017 Andrew Lloyd Webber reached out to me with the idea that he, Sarah and I should make a Broadway album together—she as the singer, I as the producer and he as something along the lines of a facilitator or executive producer.
I didn’t need a lot of convincing. I’d enjoyed working with Sarah on Carousel and I’d met Andrew two or three times and found him very agreeable. And when, in subsequent conversations, we developed the idea of avoiding classic Broadway songs in favor of lesser-known selections—in the words of the album title, “The Songs that Got Away”—I was quite excited by the prospect.
The album that emerged in the end wasn’t entirely the one I’d envisioned, and I myself wasn’t there for the end of the process. I’m still very happy with the work I did on it, and happy to have helped bring it into existence.
Andrew and Sarah were very serious about the project, to the extent of inviting me to spend a couple of days with them at their home in England to explore possible song choices. Andrew owned a triplex at Trump Tower, only a few blocks from where Irene and I lived in Manhattan, but Sarah was still starring in The Phantom of the Opera in London, so the meeting had to be in England.
This was fine with me, as a chance to build a closer relationship with Andrew and also as an adventure in its own right. I flew over to London, went to see Phantom (not for the first time) and, when the show was over, Sarah drove me back to Sydmonton Court, their home on Watership Down in Hampshire.
The house was a baronial mansion, the largest, most ornate house I’ve ever been in, filled with Pre-Raphaelite art, of which Andrew is an assiduous collector. The guest suite in which I was installed was almost as large as the whole downstairs area of my present house on Long Island. There was a sitting room, a bedroom and a bathroom, and everything was quite opulent. It didn’t feel like somebody’s guest room, it felt like staying at a luxury hotel.
One detail in particular has stuck in my mind, something I’d never seen before: The bathroom was carpeted, and the carpeting went up the sides of the bathtub. I asked Sarah why that was, and she said, “I don’t know, it was there before I got here. It was the first Sarah.” (She was referring to Andrew’s first wife.)
Andrew obviously loved living in this magnificent house, which was surrounded by a 5,000-acre estate—imagine a 1980s version of Downton Abbey. He was the lord of the manor, and he enjoyed that role. He even took me to see his dairy farm, where we watched the cows being milked.
When I arrived, late that night, Andrew was watching Shoah on television, and the three of us stayed up quite late to watch a great deal of the movie, which is very long. Then they went to bed, but I stayed up and watched it till the end.
The next morning we had breakfast and then sat down in their music room, with me at the piano and them sitting close by as I started going through tunes. Mostly it was me playing songs that I thought might appeal to them, because I have an enormous number of show tunes in my head, and Sarah wasn’t particularly familiar with the Broadway repertoire. Andrew had a better idea of it, but I still knew the most of the three of us.
I had come prepared with some ideas to run by them, but also thought of others as we went along. Of course they also had some ideas, and came up with others as well. The final choices represent ideas from all three of us.
One of my ideas was Frank Loesser’s “A Simple Song,” also known as “Three-Cornered Tune,” an early version of the opening “Fugue for Tinhorns” from Guys and Dolls. I played it for Andrew and Sarah, and they both liked it, so we put it on the album. They were less enthusiastic about was my suggestion that Sarah return to the song continuously, throughout the album, as a kind of interstitial leitmotif, almost as if she were thinking about which song to do next and singing a little of “A Simple Song” before going into something else. That idea didn’t fly with them, and maybe they were right.
I had a few more suggestions that they liked, including “I Am Going to Like It Here,” an underrated song from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song (1958), and Steve Sondheim’s “I Remember Sky” from Evening Primrose—one of my favorites among his songs. I was especially pleased that they included the beautiful, little-known “Away from You” from Rodgers & Harnick’s Rex, and “Lud’s Wedding,” a Bernstein-Lerner calypso duet from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that you hardly ever hear anyone sing. Andrew brought in Richie Pitts for the male half of the duet, and for me, it’s one of the high points of the album.
“Meadowlark,” a beautiful Stephen Schwartz song from The Baker’s Wife (1976), was one of Sarah’s suggestions, and she sang it beautifully. She also chose “Mr. Monotony,” an Irving Berlin song cut from the 1948 movie Easter Parade, and “The Silent Heart,” by A.P. Herbert and Vivian Ellis, from the 1947 West End musical Bless the Bride, which apparently is quite a famous song in England. Another British song I didn’t know was Noël Coward’s “If Love Were All” from Bittersweet. Being introduced to that lovely song was one of the nice side benefits of the project.
Sarah wanted to do “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta,” an aria from Puccini’s La Rondine (1917). It didn’t really fit the concept of the album, and I was afraid of it, because it’s a famously difficult aria. I said, “Sarah, I don’t know if you want to put yourself in competition with opera singers.” But she did, and she did it very well.
The other Sarah selection that I pushed back on was Andrew’s “Half a Moment,” from Jeeves (1975), one of his earliest shows, with lyrics by Alan Ayckbourn. I wasn’t too keen on that one, not because I didn’t like the song—which is delightful—but because it was by Andrew.
“I don’t know if you want to plug your husband on this album,” I told her. “You might want to distance yourself from being Mrs. Andrew Lloyd Webber.”
But she disagreed, and in the end it worked out well. That’s what makes good albums. You give and take, you push and pull, and something good comes of it. Having spent most of my career in classical and Broadway recordings, where the material is usually a given, I haven’t done a lot of that, but I always enjoy it when the opportunity presents itself.
The couple of days I spent with them, trading songs back and forth, was the high point of this project, as far as I was concerned. They were both very nice people, and the whole thing had a loose, free-wheeling atmosphere that I enjoyed very much. I remember Andrew literally skipping through the house singing the Irving Berlin song “The Secret Service Makes Me Nervous,” from Mr. President (1962). He was very good-humored, and we got along well.
At the time, we didn’t discuss who was paying for any of this. I assumed the recording would wind up at MCA, but to this point Andrew was footing all the bills.
After we had chosen most of the repertoire, I hired various arranger/orchestrators for the songs, and we had our first recording session in London. By then, however, it was becoming clear that Andrew did not like several of my choices, and that he would rather work with Sarah one-on-one, without me in the middle. We recorded probably a half-dozen songs which I edited and mixed, including five that ended up on the album: “I Am Going to Like It Here,” “Silent Heart,” “Three-Cornered Tune,” “What Makes Me Love Him?” and “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta.”
I then returned to New York, and it was some time later that I heard from Harry Rabinowitz, the primary conductor on the album, who telephoned me to say that Andrew had booked another session in London. That was the first I’d heard of it, but Harry gave me the time and place and, since nobody had ever called me off the project, I booked a Concorde and flew to London.
I arrived at the session about a half-hour late, and it was immediately clear that my not having been informed was not an oversight. Andrew did not want my participation in what was now his project, with his wife as the singer and him as the producer. It was, obviously, an awkward conversation. He felt that he knew Sarah and her voice better than I did, which was certainly true, and he wanted to be the primary voice in the interpretations. There was nothing I could do about it—I liked them both too much to want to fight about it—so I turned around and went back to New York.
Although I was very hurt at the time, Andrew had every right to take over the project—it had been his idea, and he had fronted the early costs. I only wish he had sat down with me to let me know what he was thinking and feeling, instead of simply booking further recording sessions without a word to me. I think it was simply because he didn’t want to have a confrontation, though, and at this stage I bear him no ill will.
When the album came out (on Polydor, not MCA) in November 1989, Andrew thanked me profusely in the notes (“I would particularly like to thank Thomas Z. Shepard, whose support for the project early on resulted in this happening”), and the five songs I worked on are credited as “Orchestra recorded by Thomas Z. Shepard.” That’s accurate because, even on the songs we had recorded together, Andrew took the orchestra tracks from my recordings, had Sarah redub the vocal lines and remixed them to match his own vision.
Other than “Dreamers,” a Christopher Adler/Marvin Hamlisch song from the musical Jean Seberg (1983), which is credited to Hamlisch as producer, the album is credited as “Produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber,” and rightly so. I had been the producer when we recorded those five songs, but the versions on the album were produced by Andrew. After the passage of time left me able to joke about the experience, I said that the title of the album should be “The Producer that Got Away.”
I wish it hadn’t come out that way, because it essentially marked the end of my relationship with Andrew and Sarah. We crossed paths occasionally thereafter, and were always cordial, but Song and Dance remains the only one of Andrew’s shows for which I’ve ever produced a cast album.
I’d have liked to have done more, because I really think he’s an outstanding composer. One of the Broadway cast albums I’ve most regretted not getting a chance to make was The Phantom of the Opera. The existing album, produced by Andrew, is by no means a bad one, but I believe it could have been a much better recording, something really gothic and remarkable. I’d have worked for a different sound quality for the underground and above-ground scenes, for one thing. I can’t say exactly what I might have done differently, but I would have loved to have had a chance to play around with it.
As for The Songs that Got Away, of course I’d have liked to have been around to finish the recording, but that wasn’t meant to be. It’s still a wonderful album, and I’m pleased to have contributed to it.
Symphonic Pictures: Jesus Christ Superstar/The Phantom of the Opera (1988).
Sales for our two “Symphonic Recollections” albums had been nothing to discourage us from doing another one, so the next year Luther Henderson, Paul Gemignani, the Royal Philharmonic and I were back in London for round three.
There were two major difference this time: First, instead of spreading our nets wide and including selections from more than a dozen composers and two or three dozen different shows, as we had before, we focused on one composer and two shows. Andrew Lloyd Webber was the composer, and the shows were what in 1988 served as bookends to his Broadway career: Jesus Christ Superstar and The Phantom of the Opera.
Second, this time we incorporated the Ambrosian Singers under chorus master John McCarthy. The previous two albums had been entirely instrumental, but this time we added human voices to the mix, allowing Luther an even wider palette to paint with. The goal, however, was not to feature Broadway singers singing Broadway songs—that would have been a regression in our project. Instead we wanted to let him use a chorus as something like another instrument, adding a whole new range of sonic coloring.
I had less to do on this one, creatively speaking. As soon as the initial concept was arrived at, my work on that end of things was done. Luther didn’t need my direction, because he understood what we were trying to do as well as I did. He went over the scores on his own, made his own choices and, as usual, did a stellar job.
By 1988 I felt that too many people—especially, perhaps, Sondheim fans who were jealous of the fact that Andrew’s shows were so much more popular than Steve’s—had become accustomed to reflexively dismissing Andrew as a hack, someone who was derivative and dependent on spectacle, whether it was dancers in cat suits, actors on roller skates or falling chandeliers. I felt that, if he were taken seriously and treated symphonically, the result would it be a revelation to many people, and that this revelation might inspire other people to present his music, as well as that of certain other sophisticated Broadway composers, in a symphonic form. Both of those have happened in subsequent years.
For my part, Luther’s work helped me to a new respect for Jesus Christ Superstar, a show I had seen in its original Broadway production but to which I had never paid particularly close attention. I had been focused on movies when it debuted in 1971, and I’m afraid that, like many classical musicians and Broadway aficionados, I dismissed it too readily as a blend of pop religion, watered-down rock and empty spectacle—“Well, just another kiddie-pop thing.” I had little use for the term “rock opera,” and I felt that any attempt to fuse rock and Broadway would most often produce work that wasn’t very effective in either category.
Listening to Luther’s work, I found myself rethinking those earlier impressions. I don’t know if I’d say that Superstar is an underrated score (except, initially, by me), but I was surprised at how much I liked the music when I heard it instrumentally. The power of Andrew’s themes hit me in a way it never had before, as pure music, and I came away newly impressed.
I also spent a little more time with Andrew during this project. We weren’t as close as we had been, but we still got along well. I remember him asking me up to his triplex in Trump Tower because he wanted to play me a record by some very cute-sounding French girl singer who had impressed him. He wasn’t thinking of doing putting her into a show or doing anything further with me, he just wanted me to share his enjoyment.
I don’t remember him saying anything particularly memorable about what Paul, Luther and I were doing, but I’m sure he liked it—if only because he ran with the idea on his own. Almost immediately after this, he started doing symphonic concerts of his music. I suppose he might have had that idea on his own, but I can’t help thinking that hearing this album may have sparked the notion, or at least inspired him to make it real.
Even after the problems with The Songs that Got Away, I enjoyed my time with Andrew. There was a certain lightness to him. He smiled readily and was very enthusiastic about whatever he was talking about. I really liked his company.
From Chapter 34:
Music of the Night (1990).
One of the first people to reach out to me, after I’d left MCA, was an unlikely one: John Williams, the film composer and, at the time, conductor of the Boston Pops. I had never met John in the flesh, but our paths had crossed (as I’ve described earlier) when he wrote the score for a film called The Reivers (1969) and was very pleased with the work I did on the soundtrack album.
Given that almost 20 years had passed since then, I was surprised when I heard that John wanted me to produce his recordings with the Boston Pops. The orchestra had recently left its longtime label, Phillips, and was now on Sony Classical, the successor to what had been Columbia Masterworks. John wanted to start off his work for Sony with a bang, doing an album of Broadway music. Perhaps it was my recent experience at MCA doing symphonic recordings of Broadway music that brought me to his attention, but I’m fairly sure that The Reivers was also in his mind, because one of the first albums I did for the Pops was Music for Stage and Screen (1994), and it included a new arrangement of his music from that relatively obscure film.
Music of the Night was a fairly straightforward project, a collection of symphonic arrangements of such songs as “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” (from Gypsy), “Love Changes Everything” (from Aspects of Love) and the title song, from The Phantom of the Opera. It also included extended medleys paying tribute to Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Jule Styne. I had nothing to do with selecting the material or choosing the orchestrators, but the recording came out very well.
Sony’s contract with John wasn’t limited to the Boston Pops, however. My next recording with him would not involve the Pops, and would be an altogether new experience.
The Broadway I Love (1991).
Plácido Domingo apparently enjoyed making Man of La Mancha, because less than a year later we were back in the studio, recording a collection of Broadway songs titled The Broadway I Love.
I’ve done Broadway albums with a number of singers from outside that world, and the key issue in every case is choosing the right repertoire. I believe that almost any professional singer can sing Broadway songs (though there are certainly some who shouldn’t!), because Broadway is not one style but many—the key is to find the songs that will work for that particular singer. Working with Domingo, my thoughts naturally turned to passionate love songs; I didn’t try to sell him on comic or character songs like Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City” or Jerry Herman’s “Hello, Dolly.”
Another crucial element is the arrangements. Domingo may be able to sing Cole Porter’s “So in Love” as well as Alfred Drake, but he’s not the same kind of voice (most obviously, he’s a tenor and Drake was a baritone). A typical Broadway arrangement wouldn’t suit him at all.
The orchestra was again the London Symphony, because, if you can get them, why would you use anyone else? We followed the same approach we had with Kismet, recording all of the orchestral tracks in London and subsequently recording Domingo and a couple of guest duet singers in New York. This time the conductor wasn’t Paul Gemignani, but Domingo’s favorite conductor, Eugene Kohn. Eugene has conducted him hundreds of times, and Domingo trusts him and feels very comfortable with him on the podium.
This time, actually, Plácido did come to one of the orchestra sessions, but he didn’t sing a note. He happened to be in London at the same time we were there, working with the orchestra, and he came into the studio just to go over a few tempos with Eugene—to nail them down so that the orchestral tracks would reflect Domingo’s own interpretation of those songs.
That was very much in character, because Domingo is very musical. He plays the piano very decently, is an experience conductor of opera and to a large degree teaches himself the material for his recordings. By the time he walks into the studio, he’s learned the music thoroughly—he knows not only the words and the notes, but also the orchestration, the tempos and everything else. And, because he’s worked with the same conductor for more than 30 years, he knows what to expect before the first take begins.
To select the material, I worked with Axel Meyer-Wöldin, a German lawyer who was an adviser of some sort to Domingo. So I sat with Axel in his home in Grünwald, a suburb of Munich, going through song after song (just as I had with Sarah Brightman and Andrew Lloyd Webber a few years earlier). We came up with maybe 30 candidates for the album, and then I think Eugene went through them with Domingo and winnowed the list down to the 14 songs on the recording.
Since the album was designed to feature only one voice, Domingo’s, I decided not to hire a single arranger to do all the songs, but to ensure variety by putting together an all-star team of arrangers: Michael Starobin, Bill Brohn, Mack Schlefer and Luther Henderson.
Starobin orchestrated four songs, including the aforementioned “So in Love” and Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.” This was the first time Michael had written for a full-sized symphonic ensemble, and he really relished being able to write with a Hollywood scope, beautiful and very expanded.
Bill Brohn was the original orchestrator for Miss Saigon, and his contributions to the album included a new version of “The Last Night of the World.” Mark Schlefer, of course, had orchestrated Barbara Cook: The Disney Album, and he created beautiful arrangements of the classics “All the Things You Are” and “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” My old friend and colleague Luther Henderson arranged three songs, including “What Kind of Fool Am I,” the big hit from the Newley/Bricusse musical Stop the World—I Want to Get Off (1962).
These were four brilliantly creative arrangers, each a master of his craft. I don’t know whether they felt the need to turn it up a notch because of “competing” with the others, but there isn’t a bad arrangement on this album, and some are downright marvelous.
To expand the sound range of the album, we decided to bring in two outstanding female voices to team with Domingo, one from Broadway and the other from the pop world.
The wonderful Rebecca Luker agreed to join Plácido on “All I Ask of You,” from The Phantom of the Opera. She was actually starring in the show on Broadway at the time, so the song was second nature to her—she just had to adjust to the new arrangement. We sent a car to pick her up when she finished the show, which was after 11 p.m. She got to the studio probably around midnight, worked with Domingo for a couple of hours and then went home. Domingo, of course, kept on going—I’ve never met anyone else like him.
That song was easy enough to do. The real kicker was “The Last Night of the World.” Since I knew Joanna and Lucy Simon, it wasn’t hard to get in touch with their sister, Carly, and ask her to sing with Domingo on “The Last Night of the World.” I thought it would give the album a certain contemporary feeling, which was desirable because most of the rest of the album was decades-old material.
I found Carly aloof; she rarely included me in any conversation, and was clearly in a take-over mode. I had such a warm relationship with her sisters, Johanna and Lucy, that I was somewhat taken aback by Carly’s attitude. She was a good singer, however, and very self-assured, not at all intimidated by Domingo—she even gave him a few pointers, which he took good-naturedly.
It was a very difficult duet to record, because Carly has a small voice and Domingo has a huge one, and there is a limit to the amount of artificiality you can bring to blending a loud voice and a soft voice. With modern technology you can make a whisper as loud as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but a whisper that loud won’t sound like a whisper, but a roar. Turned up as loud as Domingo, Carly didn’t sound like Carly.
She didn’t like the first mix I made, because she felt she was too soft. Instead of expressing her dissatisfaction to me, though, she asked Ahmet Ertegun, head of Warner Records, to “see to it” that I made her loud enough. Ahmet came into our mixing sessions (accompanied by an assistant who seemed to be there only to light all his cigarettes) and was extremely high-handed.
In the end we compromised, and it came out fine. Some friends of mine who have the recording even think it’s the best track on the whole album. Not me.
Carly surprised us all by bringing two guests to the recording session: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Mike Nichols. They were neighbors and friends, I think from Martha’s Vineyard. Meeting Mrs. Onassis was exciting, but having to do my job in front of Mike Nichols, whose stage and film work I greatly admired, really intimidated me.
Despite the issues with Carly, it was very nice having these particular women for these two duets, because they’re nothing alike. Carly is a sexy, raspy mezzo, while Rebecca is the purest-sounding soprano. If you’re looking for varied sound quality, you couldn’t do better.
Well, technically we had three duets. It was Michael Starobin’s idea, in “Try to Remember,” to have the voice of a young boy singing the echoing chorus “Follow, follow, follow, follow … ” We hired a kid named Ted Huffman who was extremely good, and then, with the use of echo and stereo, I got that “follow, follow, follow” going all over the place. It’s the first cut on the album, and I thought it was a nice touch, for an album of classic Broadway songs, to begin it with something called “Try to Remember.” It gets the album off on just the right foot.
One of my favorite tracks from this album … wasn’t actually on the album at all.
Domingo was a huge fan of the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso (1873-1921); he’d actually done a tribute album called Domingo Sings Caruso (1972), but he’d never heard Caruso’s recording of George M. Cohan’s “Over There,” a huge hit in 1918. (In the spirit of Allied cooperation—and, probably, to encourage overseas sales—Caruso sings the second half of the song in French.) When I played it for him, Domingo was visibly impressed.
Bill Brohn wrote us a beautiful arrangement of Cohan’s song, and Domingo sang the hell out of it, soaring over a majestic male chorus with a series of impressive arpeggios. It was 2 a.m. in a recording studio in Queens when he finished the arpeggios with a high B natural, and he popped it out like it was nothing at all.
You can hear that on the album. What you can’t hear, though, is a variation that I’d come up with. I noticed that Caruso’s recording was actually quite compatible with Domingo’s in terms of tempos and keys, though they sounded very different because they were different singers and, of course, the 73 years between the two recordings had brought a huge improvement in audio technology. I thought it would be fun to splice Caruso’s version into the Domingo version, and when I tried it I was amazed at how well it fit. I played it for Domingo, and he was delighted with it.
It isn’t on the album because RCA had the rights to the Caruso recording, and for some reason they decided to be difficult about it. The head of business affairs there was a man I knew and liked very much, but he kept putting up these little roadblocks—insisting that they needed to get it cleared by the Caruso estate, but not actually doing it—until finally we ran out of time. The release date had arrived, and the album had to go out without the Domingo/Caruso duet
I’ve kept my mix recording, of course, and when I do lecture programs I often play it as a demonstration of how recording technology evolved through the 20th century. It always goes over big with the audience, both because the point about the technology is very clear and because Domingo and Caruso (and Bill Brohn) sound so wonderful.
I got a very good fee for this recording, something like $45,000—serious money in those days and, believe me, I earned it!—and I also had a royalty arrangement. About three weeks after the record was released, out of the blue, the Dutch company that was handling the accounting for this project sent me a check for $15,000. I’d already been paid for the session and the royalties weren’t yet due, so I called them up and said, “I think you’ve made a mistake.” They agreed, they thanked me very much for letting them know, and I tore up the check.
But here comes the irony: I’ve never gotten all the royalties from this recording that I’m firmly convinced were owed me. Warner Bros. Records, which released the record in the U.S., then sold it to a German label who basically told me, “What do we know? We didn’t know there was any royalty arrangement.”
Next time somebody sends me $15,000 out of the blue, maybe I’ll cash the check and not ask any questions. But I guess the psychological tests at Columbia, back in 1959, were right: I’m basically honest.
The Broadway I Love was a great way to wrap up a year or so in which things had changed for me in many ways. I’d come into 1990 knowing that it wasn’t looking good for me to get a full-time job with a new record label and without any real assurance that the freelance-producer idea was going to work out for me. I came out of 1991 looking forward to what lay ahead of me. And there was a lot to look forward to.
From Chapter 36:
Leading Man: The Best of Broadway (1996).
Crazy for You (1993) was the first half of a two-record deal I’d signed with Steve Murphy and Angel Records. The second recording was baritone Thomas Hampson’s Leading Man: The Best of Broadway, which was recorded in early 1994 but not released until January 1996.
Born in Indiana and raised in Spokane, Washington, Hampson is one of the greatest American voices of his era. His primary focuses have been opera (he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1986) and lieder, he’s also had a lifelong interest in Broadway. In the early 1990s he made several well-received studio-cast albums, including Kiss Me, Kate and two others with John McGlinn and On the Town with Michael Tilson Thomas. So it didn’t surprise me to learn that he wanted to do an album of Broadway selections. (He has continued to explore the Broadway repertoire since then, with albums focusing on Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein.)
This was very definitely Steve Murphy’s project, not mine. By the time Steve asked me to produce the album, he and Tom already had in mind what songs they wanted him to sing. I may have been involved in some discussions of repertoire, but the final selection was theirs, not mine. I don’t say that in any spirit of complaint; I was very happy with their choices. It was a nice cross-section of material, balancing older songs by Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe and Adler & Ross with newer material from Beauty and the Beast, Merrily We Roll Along, Les Misérables, Nine and The Secret Garden.
I did have some say in the choice of arrangers, in collaboration with Angel producer Tony McAnany. He pushed strongly for some contemporary arrangers who were new to me. Like the choice of some newer songs, this also turned out to be good for me, because I tended to work with the same five or six people regularly—Luther Henderson, Jonathan Tunick, Bill Brohn and so on. This album introduced me to some younger arrangers who were very talented. Some of my old reliables were there—Brohn, Tunick and Michael Starobin—but so also were Claude Gaudette, Jeremy Lubbock, Don Sebesky and Pat Williams, all of whom were new to me and did fine work. Being pushed out of your comfort zone can be valuable!
I did have one old friend and colleague on the recording, though: Paul Gemignani was on the podium, conducting what he called the American Theatre Orchestra. This was his name for the pickup group of favorite Broadway players and sidemen that he assembled whenever the need arose. For this album Paul had called on 30 to 35 musicians, and they were very good. Paul knew this repertoire backward and forward, and by now he was well accustomed to giving Broadway music a classical sheen.
Due to the size of the orchestra, we couldn’t record at Master Sound in Astoria, New York, where I did a lot of work in these years. I certainly had no complaints about going back to the Hit Factory, on Manhattan’s West Side, where I’d recorded Kiss of the Spider Woman and Damn Yankees, among others. The Hit Factory had plenty of room for the musicians, and its backup engineers were superb. Technical problems were very rare and, if one did crop up, it was fixed within 30 seconds. It was a great place to work. (I did the editing and mixing at Master Sound, though.)
Tom Hampson was friendly, relaxed and a pleasure to work with. He sings easily and very freely. He understands his voice so well, and seems almost casual when he’s working—but the results show that he’s always immaculately prepared.
Convention dictates that solo albums of this kind have 12 tracks. This is entirely a residue of the era when six songs fit comfortably on each side of an LP. There’s no reason that a CD can’t have 20 or 25 songs on it, and some do, but recital albums of this sort always seem to have 12. Except Leading Man—it has only 11 tracks.
The missing one is the Gershwins’ “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” and it may well be that its absence is my fault. I gave Tom some off-the-wall advice, and I think it threw him a curve and got in the way of his performance. The song is a Gershwin classic, originally sung by Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers in Shall We Dance (1937). It’s a song of parting, of nostalgic reminiscence, about missing someone before she’s even gone. It’s a beautiful song, and Astaire’s performance is one of his best ever—which may be why I said to Tom, “I think there’s an awful lot of Fred Astaire in that song. I think he could be a model for the way you sing it.”
Now, Astaire was a great singer, as is Tom Hampson, but they weren’t at all the same kind of singer. Astaire was a great interpreter of Gershwin, Berlin, Kern and Porter, but he had a very limited voice, tuneful but light and without a lot of power or range. A key part of his interpretations was to find a way to put the songs across within his limited vocal abilities. Tom is also a great interpreter of songs, but his voice is a gorgeous one, with a sheer aural beauty that Astaire could never have hoped to possess, and it may be that comparing him to Astaire threw Tom off his stride. In any case, that turned out to be the least satisfactory track we recorded; the final decision not to use it wasn’t mine, but I understood it. In this particular case I may have outsmarted myself.
Far more successful was our recording of “Hey, There,” the Adler & Ross song from The Pajama Game. “Hey There” is a gimmick song, sung by Sid, the pajama factory’s new manager, who is working with a Dictaphone in his office. He uses the Dictaphone to record some cynical advice to himself—forget about the romance, brother. As he plays back the recorded song, however, he starts reacting ruefully to his own advice, then singing with himself in a soaring duet. The song was a big hit for John Raitt (the original Sid) in 1954.
The problem, of course, was that outside the context of the show, the basic idea of the song is hard to grasp. The sonic difference between a live actor and his own recorded voice is clearer than that between two recorded versions of the same voice, and the listener could easily end up confused. Many performers who have covered the song have simply sung it as an ordinary solo.
We came up with a better idea, though. Raitt was still alive, and we invited him to sing Sid’s voice on the Dictaphone for our recording. Raitt was 79 at this point, but he was still fit and had plenty of energy. He came in separately from Tom, and recorded his part as an overdub. Although he no longer had the muscular baritone that had driven his performances as the original Billy Bigelow in Carousel and the original Sid, his older, huskier voice was still tuneful—and the duet between iconic voices separated by a generation was powerful in itself.
Steve Murphy had treated me well and we’d had a very productive working relationship in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, Leading Man was to be my last project for Angel. The blame went, as it often does, to my inability to keep my mouth shut and let the world turn.
I’ve described my 1994 interview with Show Music magazine, in which I mentioned in passing my disappointment that Steve Sondheim was shopping Passion to labels other than RCA, to which I thought he should have shown more loyalty. That offhand comment touched off an explosive response from Sondheim, but he wasn’t the only one who was upset. Passion had ended up with Angel and, while I didn’t see how my comments could possibly be construed as criticism of Angel, Steve Murphy took it that way. He was angry with me, and decided not to do any further projects with me, which I regretted.
One thing I’ll never know is whether that reaction had anything to do with the fact that Leading Man, recorded in mid-1994, went unreleased until early 1996. I can’t believe that it did, since—regardless of Murphy’s feelings toward me—he wouldn’t have let them interfere with his relationship with Tom; but I have no idea what other reason there might have been.
Regardless, it’s a very good recording. Everything Tom sings is beautiful, but the material here really demonstrates his range as a musical-theater singer.
Betty Buckley: An Evening at Carnegie Hall (1996).
Whenever Betty Buckley and I run into each other, it’s a lovefest. We first met in 1969, making the original-cast album of 1776. She was 22, fresh out of Texas and in her first Broadway role; I was 33 and still fairly new to original-cast albums of hit shows, and we bonded over our shared joy at having arrived. She was delightful, and we’ve stayed in touch. And whenever I’ve seen her through the years, we always look back with pleasure on that experience, when we were both not much more than kids. 1776 was one of those magical recordings, the kind where you don’t even realize how wonderful it is at the time, but later on you look back on it with such fond memories.
This was almost 30 years later, though, and in all that time we’d never worked together again. She’d gone on to great success onstage, most memorably in her Tony-winning performance as Grizabella in Cats. But she’d also been in movies and on television, notably as Abby on Eight Is Enough (1977-1981). So we were in very different places when we finally got to work together again in 1996.
Back when I’d been working at Columbia Records, I’d gotten to know a guy in the business-affairs department named Mort Drosnes, who had a small record label of his own. own. I hadn’t seen Mort for at least 10 years, but he called in 1996 to ask me to produce a live album for his label—Betty Buckley’s upcoming Carnegie Hall concert. Of course I said yes; the chance to do another project with Betty was more than enough incentive to do it, even if making a live album isn’t on a par with an original-cast album or even a studio album.
When you record a live event, the important part is the advance planning. Everything needs to be perfect, every microphone in the right place, every level checked and rechecked, because, once the performance begins, you’re going to have to take what you get. If you’re fortunate and if the budget permits, you may be able to stay after the concert for additional takes and repairs, but nobody wants to do that. I’m glad to say it wasn’t necessary in this case.
Paul Gemignani was conducting his American Theatre Orchestra again, this time with perhaps 50 musicians, and I remember having a rare cross word with him that evening. It was not too long before the concert, and suddenly things weren’t sounding like they were supposed to sound—something was off in the orchestra. It turned out that he’d moved one of the violas to the end of the second-violin section, and now that viola was coming out of a different mike than all the others. I was very testy, as I recall, barking at him, “You can’t do that without telling me!” It wasn’t a big thing, we rearranged the mikes and everything was fine, but I was surprised that a conductor of Paul’s experience would make that sort of change without letting me know.
As with Follies in Concert, I didn’t get to see the concert live. I was at the hall for several hours beforehand, but half an hour or so before the show, I touched base with Betty, made sure that everything was as it should be and headed out to the sound truck, which I believe was parked on 56th Street, right behind the hall.
People have asked me why I was sitting in a truck for Follies or for this concert, and the answer is simple: Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall were designed to be great performance venues, not great recording studios. They have amplification systems, of course, but those systems are built to deliver the sound from the stage to the people in the audience. Performance venues don’t have the infrastructure that a recording studio has, particularly in terms of engineer’s consoles and the fixed wiring that you’ll find in a studio.
On many occasions, especially in the early years of my career, the answer was to bring all that equipment into the hall, set it up there and record the program with the production team sitting in a jury-rigged booth elsewhere in the building. That’s what we did, in fact, at the first recording session I ever attended, with the New York Philharmonic at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn, back in 1960, and on any number of occasions thereafter.
The difference between the St. George and Carnegie Hall, obviously, is that the former didn’t involve an audience. Everybody there was directly involved in the recording, or was a guest of someone who was. This allowed the producer and the engineer to control the recording environment as tightly as they wished.
Things are different when the venue is open to the public: The presence of audience members, ushers, bartenders, souvenir vendors, security people and God knows who else introduces hundreds and hundreds of variables into the equation, and the last thing you need at a live event, when a second shot at the material is difficult, expensive or simply impossible, is to introduce unnecessary variables.
Besides which, since we can’t put our equipment directly in front of the performers, the way we can in the studio, why should we lug two tape machines, a control console, a video monitor and three loudspeakers—not to mention two engineers, a producer, an associate producer and four chairs—into the hall, just to sit somewhere else in the building? If we’re going to be operating remotely, depending on cables to connect us to the hall, why bother to unload the truck at all?
The idea of mounting sound equipment in a truck for easy mobility dates back to the 1920s, when they were used to promote political candidates. I don’t know when the idea of a self-contained production truck—basically a rolling control room—originated, but by the 1970s they were commonly used for remote recording dates and broadcasts. The major record labels, radio stations and television networks all have them today and, if you look around outside a major performance venue or sports stadium, you’ll often spot thick, reinforced cables trailing out of the venue and into an inconspicuous panel truck, RV or semi trailer parked nearby, safely out of the way.
Inside the sound truck, the chaos of a performance venue during a show is replaced by order and control. All our gear is there, and so are all our key personnel, working in an environment in which the producer and the lead engineer have maximum control over what goes on. Why don’t we bring the gear inside? Because it doesn’t need to be inside—everything we need is already where it needs to be.
So as Betty sang a terrific program—besides her hits from the various shows in which she’d starred, it included Richard Rodgers (with Hart and with Hammerstein), Kurt Weill and unexpected choices like “Amazinf Grace,” Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Come On, Come On,” Stephen Schwartz’s “Meadowlark” and Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes”—I sat in the truck, listened to the live feed and took notes to guide me in the subsequent editing and mixing.
(For trivia enthusiasts, this album’s four Sondheim songs constitute my last Sondheim recordings, at least to date.)
The editing and mixing were straightforward, as you’d expect with most of the songs involving the orchestra and a single voice (there were guest singers on a few songs), and the album came out very well, a nice record of a very enjoyable performance.
Ironically enough, despite my decades of recording classical music, this was the first recording I’d ever produced at Carnegie Hall. I’d played there, though! Back in 1965, Columbia producer Tom Frost recorded a live Vladimir Horowitz concert for an album called Horowitz at Carnegie Hall (An Historic Return). Horowitz was notoriously persnickety, wanting everything just so, and Tom wanted to have the sound just right for him. So he and I made a deal: I would play a complete Schubert sonata from the stage; he’d record it for me to keep; and meanwhile they would use my performance to adjust their balances so that, when Horowitz got there, everything would be spot on.
So, yes, the seats were empty, but I did play Carnegie Hall in 1965.
I’d be there again, in 2001, for a recital of my own—not in the main hall, but in the recital hall, a wonderful space that holds probably 300 people. I was about to turn 65 and, two years earlier, I’d decided that I wanted to mark the occasion by giving a recital at Carnegie Hall. I spent a lot of time in 1999 and 2000 preparing for this, because I wanted to be at my absolute best and because most of the repertoire was new to me—I didn’t want to just repeat the stuff that I’d played when I was younger. So I worked very, very hard at it.
When the day came, close to 300 of my nearest and dearest came to hear me play, and it went very well. Coincidentally, at the time Irene’s painting studio was upstairs among Carnegie Hall’s famous artist’s studios, so after the recital we had the reception there. It was a wonderful evening for me, and I’ve got a recording that I’m proud of and loads of pictures to prove that, yes, I actually played Carnegie Hall.
From Chapter 38:
To an Isle in the Water (1998)
This unusual song set straddled the line between Broadway and classical, with a classical composer (and a classic poet as lyricist) matched with a Broadway singer and a Broadway conductor.
The composer, John Aschenbrenner, was a friend of Joe Castellon, one of the engineers at Kaufman Astoria. He had written the piece some years ago, setting some poems by William Butler Yeats, and was delighted to have Patti Cohenour (the original Mary Jane in Big River and Rosa in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as well as a notable Christine in The Phantom of the Opera) record the songs. I believe it was through Castellon that I got involved, and I brought Paul Gemignani aboard.
The music is beautiful, and Patti’s performance was lovely. It’s a very nice album. What lingers in my mind, though, is seeing Aschenbrenner sitting in the control room during the session, so moved by the occasion that he was literally in tears through much of it.
With a Song in My Heart: The Great Songs of Richard Rodgers (2001).
Unlike the Boston Pops, which was founded in 1885 as an offshoot of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and continues to consist primarily of members of that orchestra, the New York Pops has no connection to the New York Philharmonic. Founded in 1983 by Skitch Henderson, who was its music director until his death in 2005, it’s an independent symphonic orchestra specializing in popular music.
I’d known Skitch since 1963, when he conducted The Fabulous Voice of Richard Tucker, which I produced, and since then we’d worked together occasionally on one project or another. His wife, Ruth, owned an art gallery in New Milford, Connecticut, where in 1989 Irene had a one-woman show, so the four of us were friends for a long time.
Nonetheless, when it came to With a Song in My Heart: The Great Songs of Richard Rodgers, an album by Skitch and the New York Pops with guest vocalist Maureen McGovern, it wasn’t Skitch who offered it to me. Instead it was Jenny Hudson, the longtime director of recordings for Reader’s Digest. I don’t recall how we met, but we hit it off and she decided that I should do some producing for the magazine. On this particular record, she’s listed as executive producer.
For many years the Pops spent the summer touring parks in the greater New York area, offering a different program each year. For 2000 their summer program was With a Song in My Heart: The Great Songs of Richard Rodgers, with Maureen McGovern as the guest vocalist. Jenny had decided that a studio recording drawn from the concert would be an appealing offering for Reader’s Digest’s direct-mail program and, knowing that I had worked with Rodgers himself on several occasions, she offered me the chance to produce the record. I was happy to do so, obviously, because recording Rodgers songs is always a pleasure.
I had nothing to do with selecting the material, which I assume had been worked out by Skitch and Maureen before I was in the picture, as had the choice of arrangers. (Maureen later spent the fall doing a solo cabaret show of Rodgers songs, also called With a Song in My Heart but featuring different songs, at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan.) They were a mix of Rodgers & Hart and Rodgers & Hammerstein numbers, with three medleys. Maureen sang on eight of the numbers, and the rest were instrumental arrangements of Rodgers tunes.
By the time we got together in the studio, on June 27, 2000, Maureen, Skitch and the Pops had already fine-tuned their performances, so there was no problem getting the whole album recorded in a single day, June 27, 2000, at Sony Music Studios in Manhattan. It was an extraordinarily large room that was mostly used recording the scores for Sony films. It was larger than we needed, actually—not ideally suited for music as intimate as most of these songs—but this was the room Jenny had booked, and it was fine.
I’d never met Maureen before, because her Broadway experience in Nine and The Pirates of Penzance had been as a replacement in shows that I didn’t record in the first place. But I found her terribly nice and so well prepared, a very relaxed singer who radiated confidence. She simply knew what she was doing and, as far as I could tell, had a great time doing it.
We kept Maureen pretty well isolated, in a three-quarters isolation booth, to be sure that her vocals didn’t leak onto the orchestral mikes. This was rarely the case, though. Unlike a symphony orchestra, Skitch and the Pops routinely accompanied singers, and they fit together very well without a lot of help from the mixing board. We had her back the next day for a couple of routine fixes and that was that. She couldn’t have been nicer or easier to work with.
It was an extremely efficient day, with no real problems. All I had to do was come in and oversee the sessions, and then take care of the editing and mixing, and it was all a piece of cake, a good album that came together very organically, just because everybody involved was so good at this sort of thing.
