Customer Reviews

Moore / LaTouche: The Ballad of Baby Doe

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

... and not just with Sills, but with a fine American opera as well. This is one recording which Sills fans have demanded be reissued for years. She's in glorious form here and in radiant voice throughout, (her high D natural in the "Willow Song" will knock your socks off), and the moving final scene could bring a rock to tears. The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, and though it is 30 years old now, the engineers have made this recording sound fresh and new again. This was the recording that made me fall in love with Sills many years ago, and led me to explore other operas as she recorded them. I hope that people (especially younger people) who may be put off by opera as an "alien" art form will give this set a try and listen to how wonderful a "show" this is. My money says it will lead newbies to other American classics such as Barber's "Vanessa"--but the big bucks says Sills will win you over from her entrance scene, and the effect of her dramatic characterization and beautifully unaffected singing will stay with you long after the opera's stunning final scene. This release proves once more why "Bubbles" is a national treasure!

I fell in love with this opera through this recording. I have another which claims to be the original cast ( for those who don't know, Beverly didn't create the role ), and as fine as it is, this one stole my heart.

The impersonation are wonderful, and you really feel that the singers actually identify with the real historical characters on which the opera is based. This isn't just a rags to riches story, but a rags to riches to rags story. Moore's music is simply wondrous, and unlike so many English operas where the music seems at odds with the words, or extremely artificial, the words and music work perfectly with each other. I have to agree that the newer version has a better reproduction of the orchestra, but the singers are nowhere near as involved with making believable characters out of the story. This cast is one of those miracle casts that so seldom show up. Each piece is so moving and I found myself in awe from the beginning of the Willow Song clear to the lullaby that ends the opera. This later piece will leave you in tears. If one has never experienced American Opera, start with this wonderful work. It is far more delightful and melodious than Barber's Vanessa, or his Anthony and Cleopatra. Moore also wrote other works that are every bit as lovely as this. It is a super buy!

Listening to this recording again, I think back on the many wonderful roles that Beverly Sills performed/recorded...Manon, Violetta, the Donizetti heroines....but this is a "must-have" recording for opera fans. She truly owns the role, and the cohesivenss of the original production comes through very clearly. Supposedly the composer auditioned many, many sopranos for this role and after hearing Sills exclaimed "I have found my Baby Doe." When we lost her to cancer earlier this year, we lost a brilliant singer, a prima donna for the people, and a humanitarian--she used her stardom to support causes such as infantile autism, multiple sclerosis, and the education of the hearing impaired. She will be greatly missed.

I just recently stumbled on this re-release on CD. What a find. I had the fabulous fortune to work on two university theatre/music department productions of this work first as a theatre grad student in 1960 and later as a faculty designer in 1965 and to talk with Mr. Moore who visited with us at the '65 production. In between and later I got to see Central City (but not the production). Over the decades I have treasured and pampered my original LP set of this recording. Now I can listen with greater freedom. 1960 was my first discovery of Miss Sills. It also clinched my love of the Romantic in theatre, music and literature. Baby Doe is a great emotional story and Moore and Latouche captured the epic earthiness, foibles, tempo of it. For me it will always remain a great moment in musical theatre. If grand opera could do what this work has done for its audiences it would be more popular even in the U. S. As other have noted here, this recording is not an audiophile's modern dream. These older ears no longer care, as it is as mellow and rich as any listening experience of this work would want and at least allows clear focus on the voices of Sills, Cassel and Bible. It should be in the collection of everyone who cares about American Music and Theatre. The three lead artists are masterful in their portrayals and musically just right - indeed theatrically just right as well. More accessible than even Porgy in my mind, along with Gershwin's work it still moves me with its power as well as its beauty. As someone who never heard Baby Doe before seeing it performed, it is hard to guess at its impact on the "virginal" home listener. I would urge careful follow of the libretto and a wide sweep to the visual imagination as one listens to it.

Fans of American opera and Beverly Sills have long dreamed of this great recording being reissued, and here at last it is: perhaps the most famous of American operas, and certainly one of Sills' finest showpieces. Although the music's melange of nineteenth-century American styles does not seem quite so fresh and startling as it did when the opera premiered in the Fifties, it still has some wonderful numbers that almost every opera fan knows (such as the Willow Song, the Letter aria, and "Warm as the autumn light"), and a superior libretto. Frances Bible is a terrific Augusta, perhaps the most difficult role in the show, and she is both frightening in her wrath at "Cold? Am I cold?," as well as very moving in her final soliloquy. Walter Cassel is also a fine Horace, but the honors really go to Sills, who of course owns for all time the role of Baby Doe. Although she does fine work with the florid Silver aria and Willow Song, she is perhaps even better in her quiter numbers, such as "I knew it was wrong" and the great final aria.

With this recording, Ms Sills set her mark forever on the world of opera. Period!

Of all the recordings that she made, this one, "The Ballad of Baby Doe", is the one that brings back the most endearing memories of this wonderfully talented lady.

It was her first Big Hit role in her new-found home (New York City Opera Company); it also, just happens to be a Totally American story, and creation, written by Douglas Moore.

Here we have Ms Sills in the freshness of her youth, in a brand new role, one that few have been able to fill after her sparkling interpretation. I think it fair to say that she will "always" be Baby Doe.

This recording is a true jem, as all previous reviewers, and many others will tell you. There is NO other work like this one. It is so fresh, lovely, and of course, tragic at the same time.

Everything about this recording is "small and intimate" as this story should be presented. And, luckily, the forces behind getting this recording made, did not have access to large forces and lots of technological wizardry-type equipment and facilities to do this recording in. This makes it all the more wonderful, as I said, small and intimate.

Beverly Sills, Frances Bible, and Walter Cassell had sung this opera together, and had "lived" in their parts long enough to become real breathing characters, characters that you really do care about, and get drawn in by. I defy anyone not to become emotional when Baby Doe sings the "Willow Song", or not to become teary with her final "Always Through The Changing". Frances Bible's stiffly starched Augusta Tabor is so three dimensional that she could walk right into the room with you! And, Walter Cassell's portrail of Horace Tabor will probably never be sung with the "totally lived in" feel that he brings to the role.

From all my thousands of opera recordings, this one gets picked FIRST if I want to listen to an American work. It also gets picked FIRST when I just want to marvel at Beverly Sills' truly most-gorgeous voice at the peak of her youthful freshness and "innocence" (before she had "grown up" in all those other roles).

Deutsche Grammophone has truly done us all a great favor by bringing forward all of the ABC and previous recordings that Ms Sills made prior to her move to EMI, and, truly, we are most thankful for the beautiful remastering and refurbushing of this wonderful Great American Work by Douglas Moore. Bravo, DG!, and of course, certainly, Bravo/Brava to Ms Sills, Ms Bible, Mr Cassell, and to Emerson Buckley for holding it all together. A truly landmark recording, and one that should be on your shelves. ~operabruin

First of all, I must state that I have loved this recording for three plus decades.
I have LP copies of it on MGM, Heliodor, and DGG pressings.
But I am one who has been waiting for years to find it released on CD. When the CD set finally came out, I was beside myself with joy.

This is the Baby Doe to have.

Someone mentioned the 1996 CD recording of Baby Doe, which was recorded in the Central City Opera House.
That's a very good recording. The entire cast is/are wonderful.
And that recording includes a few bars(in the first act) which are cut from the Sills Baby Doe.

But as fine as the 1996 recording is; it would be impossible to top or even match Cassel, Sills, and Bible as the Tabor love triangle.

I attended one of the 1996 Central City Opera Baby Doe performances. I was elated to see/hear the opera performed in that glorious old house.
But I have to admit that the acoustic ambiance of the Central City Opera House was a bit tubby and dry (acoustically). The tubby and dry ambiance of the 1996 Baby Doe recording is one of the reasons I prefer the Sills recording.

Anyway.

I have made two pilgrimages to Leadville. The Tabor Grand Opera House (which is in desperate need of funds for restoration) is still standing and in business.
The Clarendon Hotel (which was adjacent to the Tabor Grand) was torn down decades ago (although evidence of the Tabor cat walk from the Tabor Grand to the Clarendon is still extant).

Both times I visited Leadville, standing on the stage of the Tabor Grand left me speechless.

But my two visits to Baby Doe's cabin at the Matchless Mine devastated me.

Both times I stood in the "cold and narrow house" in which Baby Doe died so emotionally overwhelmed me that I had to step outside. I didn't want the rest of the tourees to see me weeping.

I couldn't help reacting that way. As I stood in Baby's cabin, her final aria , "Always Through the Changing" (as sung by Sills) kept running through my mind.

For those who have not heard this Opera (especially the Sills recording) you all really must listen to it.
It's one of the few truly great American Operas.

Moore's score is glorious. The Latouche libretto is outstanding.
And the story of Baby Doe (upon which the opera is based) is well represented (with a few dramatic alterations) in the opera.

Since the advent of the CD format, every "Baby Doe" afficianado has dreamed of having this classic recording in the new format, and at last it's here.

True, the clarity of the CD format does remind us that this recording's sound quality wasn't even state-of-the-art 40 years ago. But sometimes you have to listen *through* crude sound to hear a magnificent performance, and this is one of those cases. And, to be honest, the sound isn't quite as bad as many of us have made it out to be over the years.

Most of all, we have new access to three heartfelt portrayals. Beverly Sills probably never had a finer role than Baby Doe: it suits her voice perfectly, and she recorded it at just the right moment in her career. Walter Cassel vividly portrays Horace Tabor's obssessive devotions to silver and to his "Baby." And Frances Bible, nominally the "villain" of the piece, reminds us that Augusta Tabor, more than the others, is actually the wronged character here. All three show us real human beings who make mistakes that bring tragedy down upon them, and it's all the more compelling for being drawn from the pages of America's history.

Emerson Buckley's conducting has forward thrust, and if the New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus are more than a little scrappy, they at least have energy. And since the composer attended rehearsals, performances, and recording sessions, we can assume that this version carries Moore's blessing.

There is a newer recording available in better sound, but the performance there pales in comparison to this version. Newcomers should give this folksy American score a try, and old-timers should quickly embrace the chance to welcome this old friend back into the active catalog.

I saw this at a cd store after I got La Traviata and immediately remembered Beverly Sills talking about it in both of her books. I wanted it really badly, and I just got it for my 15th birthday. I love it! When I heard the first few songs, I was unsure about the voices. Then I heard Cassel & Sills, and they were fabulous! Sills is my all-time favorite soprano and this is a great recording of her that I am attempting to expose my friends to. I *highly* recommend it to any Cassel or Sills fan.

This is the opera that made Beverly Sills an opera star. She was 29 when she first performed it with the New York City Opera in 1958. Written in 1955 by Douglas Moore, the opera is based on the true story of the already-married Colorado silver magnate Horace Tabor and the young miner's wife, Baby (Mrs. Elizabeth) Doe, with whom he fell in love. Moore writes very much in the folk-opera idiom of American opera in the mid-50s, (Carlisle Floyd's "Susannah" comes to mind), and as a result the music is extremely accessible and full of lovely melodies, particularly in the music written for Baby Doe, such as the "Willow Song" and the "Letter Song" in the first act.
Sills herself always considered the role of Baby Doe the role she most inhabited, and she is in simply sumptuous voice on this recording. She is ably supported by the underrated American baritone Walter Cassel as Horace Tabor, and by the New York City Opera's leading mezzo-soprano, Frances Bible, in the surprisingly sympathetic role of Augusta, Horace's self-righteous wife. Julius Rudel conducts the New York City Opera orchestra with his usual steady hand, and the sound quality of this 1959 recording is excellent. Anyone who enjoys American opera should add this to their collection, and for fans of Beverly Sills, this is a "must have".