The Great American Composers: Lerner & Loewe

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Since Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote only for theatrical and film productions, the assembler of a single-record-label compilation of their songs immediately must face the question: how many cast and soundtrack albums of their works are in the company catalog? For Columbia Records, the answer is several: the massively successful 1956 Broadway cast album of the team's longest-running show, My Fair Lady, as well as the 1959 London cast album; the 1960 Broadway cast album for Camelot; the 1970 soundtrack album for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (actually a Lerner-Burton Lane score); and a 1957 studio cast album of Brigadoon. Curiously, compiler Didier C. Deutsch has ignored Camelot, and he probably was prevented from using any of Barbra Streisand's performances from On a Clear Day due to contractual restrictions. But he has drawn seven tracks from the two My Fair Lady albums, plus three from Brigadoon. The next question for a compiler must be: did the label have any hits with pop recordings of the songs? And again, Columbia has a few, such as Vic Damone's Top Ten rendition of 'On the Street Where You Live.' The final question is: what else is in the catalog? And here, there are some interesting finds. Woody Herman recorded two songs from Lerner & Loewe's failed second Broadway show; other obscurities include Tony Bennett and Ann Howard recordings of songs from outside Lerner collaborations. Beyond such appropriate and interesting inclusions, Deutsch has gone to Columbia's roster of pop singers and orchestra leaders to fill up the 42-track, double-CD set. Such performances are of uneven quality; the singers, trying to turn Lerner's often specific, plot-related lyrics into more general sentiments, don't always succeed, and the '50s/'60s pop arrangements are sometimes inappropriate, but even here there are discoveries. The overall result is a mixed bag with some adventurous and some questionable choices (nothing from the Camelot cast album being the main puzzler).