The Grand Duke

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Music reviews of The Grand Duke

Music Review: Missed Opportunities
Rating: 3 Stars

To the British ear the most unpalatable aspect of any recording of a G & S Opera, or indeed any European work, made in America is the accent. In IDA this was a real problem, in UTOPIA it was almost conquered, here in GRAND DUKE it is almost non-existent although the word 'can't' still defeats the performers.

The real gripe with this recording is the amount of totally unnecessary musical (and some of the dialogue) cuts, and the disc break - why oh why does the break come in the middle of the act one finale during the "Oh horror" sequence? With disc one timed at 63:27 and the second half of the finale timed at just 8:19, left on disc one this would have made a disc length of just 71:46. With some discs lasting for 80 or more these days
this disc break is totally unacceptable. Even with a multi deck player, the playout of disc one and the playin of disc two time at 0:10 making it impossible to hear the finale without a break.

Ohio bill the opera as a "Romantic comic opera" and play it very much as they play Kalman or Strauss. Why? This is Gilbert and Sullivan. It may not be their best work (I don't know anyone who would claim that it is), but a well played and paced GRAND DUKE can, and does, sparkle like champagne. Here we have a very good white wine but there is not a bubble in sight.

The cuts that are made are of the nature of 'all or nothing' and in some cases are unintelligent. We loose the second verse of "Strange the views", very sad as the first verse is excellently sung, not to mention the fact that having given the reason why duelling is unacceptable we are not given the
Pfennig-Halbpfennigian solution.

The second verse of "As o'er our penny role" is cut. This seems to be a tradition, but as the preceding dialogue has already been cut quite considerably, this reduces Rudolph's, and even more so the Baronesses roles to a minimum.

The act one finale begins very strangely with the "Tall snobs" verse of the Ludwig/Rudolph duet. It is quite common to cut this down by a verse but I have never heard the first ditched in preference to the second. And whilst on the subject of this finale, it was here that Ted Christopher's (Ludwig) habit of lapsing into speaking his lines very much in the vein of Rex
Harrison in MY FAIR LADY became annoyingly apparent. It was also with the "Jolly Jinks" sequence that the overall lack of pace in some of the numbers (but not all) became apparent.

Ludwig's Greek pronunciation in "At the outset" is dubious to say the least, Julia misses the lines "I have a rival. Frenzy thrilled I find you both together" at the beginning of her mad scene which actually makes a nonsense of the whole scene as I don't suppose that anyone would realise that she is 'acting' a mad scene, "Come bumpers aye ever so many", "The Prince of Monte-Carlo" and "We're rigged out in magnificent array" are all shorn of their second verses.

When one considers that the two discs of UTOPIA run for 75:35 and 71:16 respectively with hardly a cut in sight, one has to wonder why so many musical cuts have been made with the two GRAND DUKE discs running for just 63:27 and 62:43, a full 20:41 short of the UTOPIA recording - more than enough time to include all the cut music and some of the dialogue as well.

All this said however, this is a pleasant recording, which, although it claims to be the "First Complete Recording", cannot perhaps be so considered by those who own the British label 'Sounds on CD' excellent reissue of the UMGASS 1973
recording which is overall more complete. Even the D'Oyly Carte recording is musically more complete than this. But the atmosphere of a live theatre recording does pervade the new issue and whilst I for one would not ditch either of the other two recordings, I will certainly listen to this again on occasion.

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