The Ultimate Rodgers & Hart Vol. 3

構成数 : 1枚
合計収録時間 : 01:02:40
Performers include: Lena Horne, Perry Como, Doris Day, Mel Torme, Gene Kelly, Ray Bolger. Personnel: Diosa Costello, Patricia Burke, Mary Jane Walsh (vocals). Liner Note Author: Dwight Blocker Bowers. The third and final volume of British archival label Pearl's misnamed The Ultimate Rodgers & Hart series covers the last several years of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's songwriting partnership, starting with their 1939 musical, Too Many Girls. The intention of the series is to collect existing recordings of songs from the songwriters' shows and movies as performed by the original cast members or film stars. Since Rodgers & Hart broke up, and Hart died, just as the vogue for original cast and soundtrack albums was beginning, these are usually individual recordings that happen to have been made, and they are necessarily incomplete. For example, there was no cast album of the original 1940 production of Pal Joey, and hence no available recording of Gene Kelly and Leila Ernst singing "I Could Write a Book" to include here. The show is represented by a dialogue scene enacted by Kelly and Martha Tilton on a 1945 radio broadcast. But while Marcy Westcott of Too Many Girls never made a recording of the show's hit, "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," Mary Jane Walsh, another cast member, did, and that leads off this album. Nothing from 1938's unrecorded The Boys from Syracuse could appear on the series' second volume, but the hit "This Can't Be Love" was repeated in the 1940 London show Up and Doing, and cast member Patricia Burke's recording turns up here. Shirley Ross of Higher and Higher did record that show's hit, "It Never Entered My Mind," so it is included. The album concludes with four familiar Rodgers & Hart evergreens featured in films of the late '40s by stars like Perry Como and Doris Day. But many of the selections are forgotten gems, making this not so much an "ultimate" as a rarities collection. ~ William Ruhlmann
録音 : モノラル／ステレオ (Studio)