ANNIE GET YOUR GUN/SEPTEMBER SONG

In a series of two CD reissues of material from the vaults of British Decca Records, the compilers mostly have stuck to combining albums by the same performer. Not this time. The consistent point seems to be that both Ethel Merman and Georgia Brown were stars of the musical theater, and that is thought to justify pairing two quite different albums on which they participated 11 years apart, a 1973 studio cast recording of Annie Get Your Gun, starring Merman (in her third go-round with the score) and a 1962 set of Kurt Weill songs by Brown. Merman was never averse to re-recording songs from her many shows; after all, she spent the bulk of her career singing those songs eight times a week for years on end, so what was another run-through (or two, or three) in a recording studio? In the case of Annie Get Your Gun, her longest running musical, she of course participated on the original Broadway cast album in 1946, and two decades later she appeared in a 20th anniversary Broadway revival that also produced a cast album. Seven years after that, she agreed to sing the role of Annie Oakley yet again in this version made in London for Decca's London Phase 4 Stereo label. Stanley Black conducted the London Festival Orchestra & Chorus, and baritone Neilson Taylor took the male lead role of Frank Butler. The version of the score presented here is the 1966 revised one, which eliminated songs for the secondary leads and added another duet for Annie and Frank, "An Old Fashioned Wedding." So, while there are a few other cast members competently piping in during such songs as "Colonel Buffalo Bill" and "(There's No Business Like) Show Business" (Neil Howlett as Charlie Davenport, Leslie Fyson as Buffalo Bill, Benay Venuta reprising her 1966 performance as Dolly Tate), Merman and Taylor are never away from the microphone for long. Taylor treats his performances as if he's at the opera, which simultaneously makes him sound pompous on these show tunes and robs his part of any humor. But then, it's really Merman who matters here. At age 65, she is still in good voice, although she certainly sounds her age, and she has a tendency to warble with a wobbly vibrato (for instance, in the word "Sioux" in "I'm an Indian, Too"), which sometimes makes her sound like an Ethel Merman imitator. This is the least of the three Merman recordings of Annie Get Your Gun, valuable mainly to Merman fans who want to compare her performances over the years.
Georgia Brown achieved recognition in a London production of The Threepenny Opera before she became a star in Oliver!, so it is appropriate that for her first solo album she chose to devote herself to the songs of Kurt Weill, among them a largely German-language reading of "Mack the Knife." Unlike other Weill interpreters, Brown really made no distinction between the German Weill and the American Weill, equally happy to sing "Pirate Jenny" and "Surabaya Johnny" (the latter also in German) on the one hand, and "September Song" and "Speak Low" on the other. But when she wasn't singing songs from Weill's Berlin phase in German, she was doing so with a distinct German accent, giving them a sense of character. She was abetted by arranger/conductor Ian Fraser, who came up with varied settings for the songs, ranging from orchestral washes to small jazz ensembles, sometimes to comment on the subject matter. Notably, his big-band swing arrangement of "Alabama Song" gave the song an appropriate swagger. Brown proved herself an able Weill singer who could balance the pointed words of Bertolt Brecht in the earlier material with the more romantic and wistful sentiments of Weill's Broadway collaborators. ~ William Ruhlmann|