I’m awash in childhood audio nostalgia. I suppose it was the Nutcracker Suite that did it, as I came across my very first grown-up record tucked away in the dining room closet and discovered that with a bit of software click removal it sounded almost new. That got me to thinking about other records that served as my faithful pets and companions back in Houston and Fort Worth when I was a skinny freckled blond kid. Concertos Under the Stars with Leonard Pennario playing the "Warsaw Concerto" as Carmen Dragon conducted the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. Pennario again, playing Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra on the now-rare Capitol P-303, its 50’s-chic surrealistic artwork accompanied by the quasi-salacious naked-lady painting for the flip side An American in Paris. A low-rent supermarket record of "Pal Joey" with Lew Raymond’s orchestra and a host of second-tier pop singers, a glamorous photo of Kim Novak (is there any other kind of Kim Novak photo?) on the cover. The soundtrack album of "The Eddy Duchin Story" with Carmen Cavallaro playing Eddy Duchin’s signature tunes—Cavallaro was an aggressive player while Duchin was gentle and refined—once again with Kim Novak on the cover. Kim Novak was getting around a lot in the late 1950s.
Nostalgia led to action and eBay. Before long I had copies of them all, invariably in much better condition than my originals.
The original 1956 cast album of My Fair Lady will be released on the latest media until the Earth Itself crumbles to dust. The 2002 digital remastering extracts every last drop of goodness out of the original tapes, so I don’t need a copy of the LP. But I played that LP practically down to the bare vinyl (just like everybody everywhere) so when I spotted a near-mint copy on eBay, I snagged it. Welcome back Chez Foglesong, Columbia OL 5090. That white, magenta-and-gold lettered jacket houses a treasure with a gray label and six Columbia "eyes" arranged around the sides. OL 5090 changed the world.
It’s probably the last great hurrah of monophonic sound, an album made by crackerjack engineers who knew everything there was to know about mixing mono for depth and focus. With 1957’s West Side Story Columbia began producing their Broadway albums in stereo, and for the most part they did a dandy job. Nevertheless, some of Columbia’s monophonic Broadway albums are sonic jewels—South Pacific from 1949, Kismet from 1953. Then along came My Fair Lady. The show was all of three days old and clearly a smash hit was in the works. That excitement is palpable as the cast romps through a score that was still new and not the cultural icon it has become. It’s hard to imagine a world without Rex Harrison as just an ordinary man or Julie Andrews being able to dance all night. But there was no such world pre-OL 5090.
But OL 5090 was more than just a vibrant performance of a brilliant Broadway show captured during its first week. It sold like hotcakes, becoming one of the highest-grossing albums of all time. All that money went pouring into the Masterworks division coffers, and Masterworks handled classical music as well as Broadway. The Masterworks head was the astonishingly cultured Goddard Lieberson, a perceptive and passionate music-lover who signed his memos "God." God took a chunk of that enormous pile of cash and used it to finance some prestige projects at Columbia. Hard to imagine a record company doing that today.
One of those projects was to engage Igor Stravinsky to conduct all of his orchestral, vocal, and chamber music. The Stravinsky sessions went on for about a decade, and with Robert Craft’s invaluable aid, the elderly master got the job done before wafting off to Petrushka’s Rite of Psalms in the sky. To be sure, Stravinsky’s renditions aren’t usually the best around. No matter. It’s like Brahms conducting his symphonies or Clara Schumann playing Robert’s piano works. Forget about concrete notions of absolute performance quality. We got the Man Himself. And as Stravinsky recedes progressively ever deeper into history, those recordings will become all the more precious. God had the balls to make it so, even in the face of resistance from higher-ups at Columbia, even in the face of his complex (and sometimes fractious) relationship with Stravinsky.
God also financed a similar series with Aaron Copland, mostly with the London Symphony Orchestra. A shelf of well-documented box sets making up the complete Arnold Schoenberg. A complete Anton Webern (not many records.) Frankly, I could give a rat’s ass about a complete Schoenberg or Webern, but thanks anyway, God.
Masterworks struck oil a few more times, first with the London cast album of—guess what—My Fair Lady (that’s the one with the gold cover), then with the lavish gatefold album of Camelot that is a lot more engaging than the show itself. Columbia Masterworks gave us two more Rodgers & Hammerstein shows—Flower Drum Song and The Sound of Music, that last not quite the über-blockbuster that the movie soundtrack was (RCA got that one) but a respectable hit nonetheless. And even if 1957’s West Side Story was recorded more out of loyalty to Leonard Bernstein than out of commercial prudence, the album is red-hot sizzling, wound up making big bucks down the years, and remains hands-down the best-ever rendition of the score. Gypsy is in many ways the very essence of the Broadway album, brilliantly recorded and just as brilliantly performed. Bye Bye Birdie is a trifle but it’s one hell of a spiffy album, Dick van Dyke and Chita Rivera in full bloom, to be followed by the stunning Cabaret.
So it makes sense that Columbia would produce some of the biggest original-cast blockbusters of the 1970s: 1776, Company, A Chorus Line and A Little Night Music are all proud members of a large and distinguished club.
But they’re all children of OL 5090, grande dame suprême of them all. Fifty-five years later it still rules. When the package arrived at my school and I lifted out that new-looking LP, people’s faces lit up: Oh, I remember that one!! I LOVED it when I was a kid!
So did I. And I still do.
