Jerome Kern: The Cabaret Girl

Ohio Light Opera (Artist, Orchestra), Jerome Kern (Composer), Michael Borowitz (Conductor) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Orchestra: Ohio Light Opera
• Conductor: Michael Borowitz
• Composer: Jerome Kern
• Audio CD (February 1, 2009)
• Number of Discs: 2
• Label: Albany Records
• ASIN: B00000DH62
• Also Available in: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #212,220 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. The Cabaret Girl

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars OLO Cabaret Girl wonderful!!, February 23, 2009

By 

C. oneil "B'way nut" (NYC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jerome Kern: The Cabaret Girl (Audio CD)

I just received The Ohio Light Opera version of The Cabaret Girl and was pleasantly surprised by the professional quality of the voices and the recording. Jerome Kern's musical, although dated , has some very funny and moving music. The lead roles of Marilyn, Gripps and Gravins are masterfully sung on this Cd. For anyone who is a Broadway "nt" must add this to your library.. These "up and coming" young artists rival nay Broadway stars!! Kudos to the cast of The Cabaret Girl and this outstanding recording!!!!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Includes libretto, September 14, 2009

By 

C. Stone-tolcher - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Jerome Kern: The Cabaret Girl (Audio CD)

I have recently purchased this CD set and as an avid collector of anything Wodehouse I could not pass this one up especially when it includes the libretto (albeit abridged- written by Wodehouse and Grossmith who also wrote the lyrics). Any Wodehouse collector will know just how difficult it is to get the book of any of the musicals he was involved in and on this recording it is included on the CDs. Wonderful. None of the comic songs as can be found in the Wodehouse/Bolton/Kern musical: "Sitting Pretty" but a wonderful performance all the same. I hope the Ohio Light Opera record some more like this.

Charles Stone-Tolcher

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Get the CD, July 10, 2009

By 

Mr Lapin (Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cabaret Girl (MP3 Download)

The Cabaret Girl is not quite operetta, not quite musical comedy, and Ohio Light Opera's singers mostly tread that line fairly well, at least to my ears. Some listeners who are arriving here from the musical comedy side of the fence may find them a bit more operatic than they like.

On the whole the orchestra does a serviceable job. However, without the visual elements of the live performance, their limitations are sometimes a bit too apparent. There are moments where rhythm and intonation falter.

Bear in mind that for this work you don't have a lot of choice. As far as I can tell it's largely been neglected since its 1922 English success. There were no known US performances until 2004, in San Francisco. That performance wasn't recorded in its entirety (or at least not all of it has been released), so as far as I know this is the first and only complete recording in the original orchestration.

Now, about the download format. I should mention first that if you're seeing this on the CD page, there's apparently an error in the mp3 link; it leads to the download of something else, not this work. If you want the download, you may have to search for it from the Amazon homepage. Search only for the title, not composer; apparently the mp3 search system doesn't know that Jerome Kern composed Cabaret Girl.

I've previously downloaded mostly pop music, not classical, from Amazon. This is the first time I've tried downloading a work of this type, and I'll think twice before I do so again. It demonstrates the limitations of the dominant song-oriented download model when applied to classical music (and I'll bet some pop music too).

The CD's tracking is apparently mainly for convenience; in most cases the audio continues right through the track break. Alas, Amazon's mp3 encoder treats each track as a separate entity. Worse, it adds a quarter-second or so of silence at the beginning and end of each cut. When I loaded all the mp3 files into a playlist, I heard an annoying and distracting break between selections.

It's not just my player, it's really in the mp3 files. I confirmed this by decoding them to wave files and viewing them in an audio editor.

That editor was also the solution to the problem. I loaded in all the decoded wave files, end to end. Then I edited out the silences (very time-consuming), and saved the result as 3 long wave files, one for each act. Then I burned them to a CD for listening. I suppose I could have re-encoded them to mp3, but then I would have lost a bit of audio quality.

Editing that way did deal with the gaps, but it was too much time and effort. Next time I'll pay the few extra dollars for the CD, and get the nice graphics to boot.