Lerner And Loewe: Orchestral Selections

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Cat No: 8555015

Release Date: 07 January 2002

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313501526

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: LERNER and LOEWE

Description
Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986) and Frederick Loewe (1901-1988)Selections from My Fair Lady • Camelot • Gigi • Brigadoon • Paint Your WagonIn collaboration with Frederick Loewe, the lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner was to produce some of the brightest, most successful of all late twentieth-century musicals. Born in New York on 31st August 1918 into a prosperous, middle-class background (his family ran a chain-store hosiery business), Alan Lerner trained first as a pianist before turning to writing (a Bachelor of Science graduate of Harvard during the late 1930s, his other educational background included schooling at Bedales in England and at the Juilliard School of Music). Employed initially as a journalist, he switched to radio where he wrote scripts and sketches for, among others, Victor Borge, Alfred Drake, and Hildegarde and Celeste Holm, and also won some fame during the early 1940s as a vocalist at the piano. He died in New York on 14th June 1986. Although later naturalised American, the songwriter Frederick Loewe was born in Vienna, on 10th June 1901 (some sources give 1904), the son of an actress and Edmund Loewe, an international tenor of some note, who first sang in New York in 1905 in operetta at the Irving Place Theatre. The young Frederick trained in Europe as a concert pianist with Ferruccio Busoni and Eugen d’Albert and as a composer with Emile Reznicek and made his first appearance at the age of thirteen as a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic. After achieving some fame in Europe as a songwriter in traditional Viennese operetta vein (his 1919 song Katrina proved a minor hit), in 1924 he settled with his father in New York where, after various unsuccessful attempts at carving a career as a performer and composer, he had, out of necessity, from the mid-1930s found a more congenial and lucrative niche as a club pianist and theatre organist, although, before he teamed with Lerner, there were occasional contributions to shows and two well-meaning musical flops with Earle Crooker, Salute to Spring (St.Louis, 1937) and Great Lady (Broadway, 1938). Based until the early 1960s mainly in New York and Hollywood, Loewe died in retirement in Palm Springs, California, on 14th February 1988. The remarkable eighteen-year Lerner-Loewe association began in 1942 at New York’s Lamb’s Club. Their first assignment, to revamp Patricia, a Broadway flop of 1941, into the equally unsuccessful The Life of the Party had a positive dénouement insofar as it laid the foundations for their future collaborations, which began in 1943 with What’s Up?, a comic "revue with sketches" starring Jimmy Savo and Gloria Warren, which reached Broadway, although it only stayed for 63 performances. Their next co-operation, The Day Before Spring (1945; with Irene Manning, Bill Johnson, John Archer and Pat Marshall), redeemed by a handful of reasonable songs, remained on the National’s billboards for a healthier 165
Tracklisting