Customer Reviews

Jerome Kern: The Cabaret Girl

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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!!!!

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

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.

The CD Cabaret Girl proves that when you add fresh, exciting singing to the music of Jerome Kern you have a happy marriage. The recording is taken from Ohio Light Opera's 2008 season, about a group of energetic cabaret performers. The dialogue is engaging and the music a quirky combo of Sullivan operetta and American jazz. The superb cast, led by Lindsay O'Neil and Stefan Gordon, romps through their trials and triumphs with enthusiam and engaging singig. I loved it.

A little difficult to hear the dialog at times but overall great. I love Jerome Kern and wish more of his musicals, esp. the early ones, were available.

Well, Opera News gave a intriguing review of this little known Jerome Kern musical.It spoke of musical numbers in the Kern style but not widely known. Being a Kern lover I hurried to Amazon, found the listing and place an order.

Much to my chagrin, the musical never materialized and my purchased was eventually canceled.

So, The Cabaret Girl is still missing!

Perhaps, Amazon will contact me again when Cabaret Girl shows up again.

Meanwhile, she is missing still!

York, where I am currently at University, is home to one of the most glorious cathedrals in England. On this disc, some of which was recorded live during services, you can experience worship there from the comfort of your own home - York Ambisonic being a small but very efficient company who have beautifully captured the natural acoustics in and around the cathedral.

The disc opens and closes with bell-ringing: this is something not often heard on recordings of sacred music, and it is a really nice touch. York Minster in fact was the first cathedral in England ever to boast a diatonic set of bells (i.e. eight possible notes can be played), so these tracks have historical significance as well as adding to the musical dimension.

Which brings us neatly to the programme. It is not perhaps as long as it could have been (the whole disc runs for about 55 minutes), but the choice of music is bold and awe-inspiring, especially in the Minster's legendary five-second acoustic. Choral items include the "Dies Irae" from Mozart's "Requiem," Benjamin Britten's short and spine-tingling "Hymn of St. Columba" and motets by Thomas Tertius Noble and Edward Bairstow, two former masters of music who were justly acclaimed in life and after death, having left a generous corpus of sacred music behind them. The current Master of Music, Philip Moore, is himself a composer (indeed I recently had the pleasure of discussing his music with him as part of a degree submission) and his lovely setting of "Through the day" is beautifully and clearly rendered as are all the other items (although certain items sound a little too muddy in places - an unfortunate drawback of the generous resonance in the Minster).

The organ works, played by organ scholar (of the time) Sean Farrell and by the long-serving assistant organist, John Scott Whiteley, are equally splendid. John Stanley's "Trumpet Tune" deserves special mention as it showcases the celebrated 'tuba mirabilis' of the Minster organ. The famous closing movement of Charles-Marie Widor's "Fifth Symphony" is also here, rounding off the musical programme with a joyful climax before the bell-ringers play the disc out with "Plain Bob Triples."

This is of course not the only recording made by the Choir and organists of York Minster, but it is certainly one of the more diverse and interesting, particularly for the casual listener. Clearly, a lot of thought went into the programme, and I find that to be the disc's best attribute alongside the performance. This is certainly worth a try if you want a REAL sample of the English cathedral tradition in progress...