Today conductor David Charles Abell began rehearsing with the orchestra that will accompany Kiss Me, Kate. The Glimmerglass production will feature the original orchestrations of Robert Russell Bennett, who recently won a posthumous Tony for his tremendous achievements.
The complete original orchestration has not been heard for many years. According to Abell, “At the time on Broadway, the orchestration was considered disposable, like the sets and costumes. Once the original production was over, the score and parts would be dumped, or put away in some archive somewhere and forgotten. I have done a lot of musicals over the years, and it has always frustrated me that it is so difficult to get hold of the orchestral score.” In the golden age of American musical theater, there was a constant pressure to create new work — and not a lot of interest in preserving the details of shows that had closed. (The 1948-1949 Broadway season saw the birth of Kiss, Me Kate and South Pacific, along with new works by Kurt Weill, Frank Loesser, Sigmund Romberg and many others — as well as the American professional premiere of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at the Ziegfield!)
Today's conductors are forced to rely on annotated piano/vocal scores for revivals of musicals, leading a band playing from parts that have their own problems: “Over the years, publishers would recopy the parts, but they were copying parts that had already been used in the pit,” says Abell. “So if a conductor said, ‘Make it short,’ one player might add a dot, one might add an accent, another might write ‘shorter.’ These markings made sense to that group of players, but once the parts were sent to a new group, no one was on the same page.” The parts were also reconfigured along the way for various touring ensembles, and without the full orchestral score, conductors had no road map.
Abell was lucky: “I got hold of the lawyer for the Cole Porter estate — they have offices in midtown Manhattan — and asked if I could take a look at what they had. I went in, and sure enough, on one of the shelves was a manuscript for Kiss Me, Kate. I recognized immediately the handwriting of Robert Russell Bennett, one of the greatest orchestrators of musical theater.” While Bennett was the primary orchestrator, it was standard practice for the workload to be shared among colleagues; in the score that Abell found, Don Walker had contributed the backing for the tarantella numbers, including “Where is the life that late I led?” The orchestration is very innovative for its time, with five saxophones and a featured guitar part.
“I spent a lot of my time comparing orchestra parts with the score,” he says. “This score is so modern — all that hot jazz stuff. Robert Russell Bennett really created that sound. These old orchestrations have a real integrity.”
The complete original orchestration has not been heard for many years. According to Abell, “At the time on Broadway, the orchestration was considered disposable, like the sets and costumes. Once the original production was over, the score and parts would be dumped, or put away in some archive somewhere and forgotten. I have done a lot of musicals over the years, and it has always frustrated me that it is so difficult to get hold of the orchestral score.” In the golden age of American musical theater, there was a constant pressure to create new work — and not a lot of interest in preserving the details of shows that had closed. (The 1948-1949 Broadway season saw the birth of Kiss, Me Kate and South Pacific, along with new works by Kurt Weill, Frank Loesser, Sigmund Romberg and many others — as well as the American professional premiere of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at the Ziegfield!)
Today's conductors are forced to rely on annotated piano/vocal scores for revivals of musicals, leading a band playing from parts that have their own problems: “Over the years, publishers would recopy the parts, but they were copying parts that had already been used in the pit,” says Abell. “So if a conductor said, ‘Make it short,’ one player might add a dot, one might add an accent, another might write ‘shorter.’ These markings made sense to that group of players, but once the parts were sent to a new group, no one was on the same page.” The parts were also reconfigured along the way for various touring ensembles, and without the full orchestral score, conductors had no road map.
Abell was lucky: “I got hold of the lawyer for the Cole Porter estate — they have offices in midtown Manhattan — and asked if I could take a look at what they had. I went in, and sure enough, on one of the shelves was a manuscript for Kiss Me, Kate. I recognized immediately the handwriting of Robert Russell Bennett, one of the greatest orchestrators of musical theater.” While Bennett was the primary orchestrator, it was standard practice for the workload to be shared among colleagues; in the score that Abell found, Don Walker had contributed the backing for the tarantella numbers, including “Where is the life that late I led?” The orchestration is very innovative for its time, with five saxophones and a featured guitar part.
“I spent a lot of my time comparing orchestra parts with the score,” he says. “This score is so modern — all that hot jazz stuff. Robert Russell Bennett really created that sound. These old orchestrations have a real integrity.”
photo:
1. Conductor David Charles Abell (second from right) showing the full score for Kiss Me, Kate at the Produciton Seminar. photo credit: Michael Manning
0 comments:
Post a Comment