Street Scene: An American Opera
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Performer: Creighton ThompsonPerformer: David Evan Thomas
Performer: David Thomas
Performer: Don Saxon
Performer: Lauren Gilbert
Performer: Norman Cordon
Performer: Wilson Smith
Composer: Kurt Weill
Conductor: Maurice de Abravanel
Performer: Beverly Janis
Performer: Elen Lane
Performer: Ellen Carleen
Performer: Hope Emerson
Performer: Marion Covey
Performer: Anne Jeffreys
Performer: Helen Arden
Performer: Peggy Trunley
Performer: Polyna Stoska
Performer: Zosia Gruchala
Performer: Brian Sullivan
Edition: Music CD
Format: Cast Recording
CD Release Date: 1990-10-25
Music Label: Sony
Soundtracks:
- Prelude
- Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed
- Ain't It Awful, the Heat
- Blues: I Got a Marble and a Star
- Gossip Trio: Get a Load of That
- Arietta: When a Woman Has a Baby
- Aria: Somehow I Never Could Believe
- Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow
- Arioso: Lonely Home
- Scene and Song: Wouldn't You Like to Be on Broadway?
- Cavatina: What Good Would the Moon Be?
- Duet: Remember That I Care
- Introduction: Morning
- Children's Game
- Song: A Boy Like You
- Duet: We'll Go Away Together
- Choral Scene and Lament: The Woman Who Lived Up There
- Lullaby
- Finale: I Loved Her Too
- Farewell Duet: Don't Forget the Lilac Bush
Music reviews of Street Scene: An American Opera
Music Review: Less than the sum of it's parts
Rating: 4 Stars
There are wonderful songs and elements in "Street Scene", and Weill won the first composer Tony ever awarded for it, but it doesn't hold together even in the recordings of the score (this or the complete). There is something condescending in its tone, 'the little people sing too' which is unintentional but done better by Blitzstein and Bernstein before and after (though in other works they obviously bow to Weill). There is nothing New York in the sound, which is odd as Weill is most chameleon of composers; the date, the period is there but the songs are either pop/Broadway or Italian operetta and don't seem to belong to this particular block. With a great cast of actor/singers it might fly, but I haven't heard them yet.
I actually prefer the recently issued Naxos Hollywood Bowl concert version with most of this cast, nearly an hour, in spite of some sound problems. The play holds up (Rice was as good as he thought he was), the music stands on its own and the best of Hughes lyrics are wonderful (the rest pedestrian), but they were not on the same page for most of it, literally.
Oddly neither this nor the Naxos recorded "Moon Faced", which was a hit for Crosby and others. When it's reissued, that would be a good bonus track.
Description of Street Scene: An American Opera
Kurt Weill harbored ambitions to compose the great American opera in the public, populist forum of Broadway, much as Gershwin did with Porgy and Bess. He did so in the 1947 Street Scene, which is a three-hour panorama of working-class American life revolving around a woman in an abusive marriage who is murdered for seeking comfort elsewhere. Weill never demonstrated a more remarkable fluency in a range of popular music style, but the piece's somewhat dated (and deliberate) sense of dramaturgy is apparent in this single disc of excerpts, performed in the comparatively reserved Broadway style of the 1940s. Though Langston Hughes's lyrics capture the Edward Hopperesque loneliness of those times, they can also be cloyingly bald. Weill's combination of pop-music manner and Puccinian operatic grandeur has since been more cohesively negotiated. However, excerpts this extensive would have been possible only in the dawn of the LP era, with cast members Anne Jeffreys, Polyna Stoska, and Brian Sullivan showing how this piece's journey started. --David Patrick StearnsGeneral CDs
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