Archive for December, 2009
The Sound of Music at 50
December 23, 2009 11:56 am
It is hard to believe that The Sound of Music is 50 years old. It is even harder to believe that when the show opened in 1959 seats sold for $5. The first release of the original cast recording took place within weeks of the opening of the show on vinyl. Since then it has been released and updated quite a few times (The first cd release of the album was in 1986). Now for the 50th anniversary we get the original master restored using 20 bit technology. What sounded great 50 years ago sounds fantastic now.
There has always been a dispute about whether the Broadway performance by Mary Martin, or the film performance by Julie Andrew, is better. To me, this dispute has always been a non-starter. The only way that you could really compare the two is if they had each performed the role in both venues. It is likely that there will never be another full scale movie of The Sound of Music so there can be no comparison. However, there have already been many revivals of The Sound of Music, the most recent in 1998, and though I really like Rebecca Luker, her performance does not touch that of Mary Martin. This new 50th Anniversary release only reminds us again how spectacular the voice, clarity and diction of Mary Martin really is. The rest of the cast included: Theodore Bikel portrys Captain von Trapp with Patricia Neway as the Mother Abess, Marian Marlowe as Elsa Schraeder and Kurt Kasznar as Max Detweiler.
The notes that come with this album, and the pictures that are contained, are an added bonus, as are the three additional bonus tracks which are included in this release. The first bonus comes from the tv special “Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett at Carnegie Hall.” This show was done three years before Andrews would make the film. It is a wonderful spoof of the family……now 20 children strong (19 brothers and Burnett) and their mother (Andrews). The second track comes from the 2005 production in Austria, the first mounted production in that country. It is a performance in German of “Edelweiss,” the last song that Oscar Hammerstein wrote before his death. The third bonus track is from the 1995 production of the show in Stockholm. They did not record the album as the show was performed, but rather, cast members performed songs fromt he show. This track features Tommy Korberg singing “Climb Every Mountain.”
Even if you have previous recordings of the original cast album, this one is special enough, in sound and bonus, to add to your library.
