Reviews: State Fair and the 20th Century-Fox Songbook

BBC Music Magazine (May 2024): A glorious resurrection: classic songs saved from the 20th Century-Fox trash heap are revived for this stunning album

This album marks the culmination of a years-long labour of love for musicologist (and featured singer) Derek Greten-Harrison, who has given new life to some of Hollywood’s most beloved standards. The once great 20th Century-Fox studio was home to a stall of some of America’s finest composers, songwriters and arrangers, who churned out musical jewels for films both memorable and distinctly not. That the orchestral parts for the likes of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s original 1945 film musical State Fair and hits such as “You’ll Never Know,” “Three Coins in the Fountain,” and “You Make Me Feel So Young” no longer existed was a travesty, though thankfully the original manuscripts on which those parts were built did survive so that Greten-Harrison could begin painstakingly rebuilding performable orchestral scores. The BBC Concert Orchestra, under David Charles Abell, give John Wilson and co. a run for their money here, delivering sparkling readings. Clare Teal and Greten-Harrison’s honeyed vocals seem from a bygone age and just perfect for this material, while the chameleon-like Scarlett Strallen fizzes and bubbles throughout. A trove of Golden Age treasures, all gloriously recorded. ★★★★★

Musicals Magazine (June/July 2024): BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by David Charles Abell, and a starry line-up of performers who capture that grand Hollywood sound

Many readers may be familiar with State Fair, Rodgers and Hammerstein's only score specifically written for the big screen. This album also features many long-forgotten relics from other movie musicals produced by 20th Century-Fox during the 1940s and 1950s. Much of the original sheet music of the time has been lost, due to being swiftly discarded after each film's release. Therefore, it’s no wonder that much of this music has not been heard (let alone recorded) outside of its original release. It is thanks to musicologist and baritone Derek Greten-Harrison's extensive research and restorations that this music can be heard in its original glory (and in surround sound) once again.

Greten-Harrison also lends his voice to the album, where he is joined by Scarlett Strallen, Clare Teal, James Taylor and Michael Feinstein. Each has a distinct voice that gives great variety and colour to each of the songs; with no visual cues or context, they inject life into the numbers. Holding everything together is the BBC Concert Orchestra, masterfully conducted by David Charles Abell - together they are able to capture that grand Hollywood sound while maintaining the intricate moments of lighter orchestration. The few instrumental tracks shine and are pleasant tonics to the vocal numbers.

Highlights include “Thats For Me” from State Fair, where Teal lends her warm alto tones to one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's greatest melodies. From the same film, “All I Owe Iowa” is a raucous all-company number that can’t help but make you smile. With harmonicas, mouth harps and ocarinas evoking the rural Midwest, there are flavours of the duo's Oklahoma!

Strallen balances the comedic with the delicate in “Always The Lady” from Three Little Girls in Blue, effortlessly floating across the leaping melody (and in multiple languages too!). “Run, Little Raindrop, Run” from Springtime in the Rockies is brought to life by Feinstein’s sonorous tones, who makes a great pairing with Strallen. A special mention must also be made of the BBC Singers, who are able to evoke that iconic 1940s sound with such depth and clarity – the sound is much more than a monolith of voices.

The double-CD album comprises 41 tracks, and it’s easy to get lost in a Golden Age stupor — the sumptuous orchestral sweeps and catchy melodies make the two-hour runtime fly by. It is accompanied by a 27-page booklet written by Greten-Harrsion with detailed insights into these numbers.

At the time of writing, this album is only available as a physical release, which is a great shame as these lost classics should be heard by all.

—Jonathan Whiting

Music Web International (May 2024)

The opportunities to review new studio recordings of major musicals on MusicWeb are few and far between. Recently the award-juggernaut that is John Wilson produced an “authentic” version of Oklahoma! which has garnered rave reviews including — slightly bizarrely in my opinion — “Best Opera Recording” in the 2024 BBC Music Magazine Awards. For sure Oklahoma! is a key work in the history of Musical Theatre and the new recording is a fine one but it ain’t no opera, no siree and the restoration of the original orchestrations/underscores and the like bring marginal gains in terms of the wider understanding and appreciation of the piece as a whole. Compare that to this new two disc set from Dutton which is a veritable treasure-trove of discoveries and reacquaintances with the great and the good from the Golden Age of 20th Century-Fox musical films. I suspect Dutton do not quite have the marketing budget of Chandos so there is a risk this pair of discs will slightly slip under the radar. Which would be a great shame because by any measure this is a rather special set.

This appears to be the passion project of Derek Greten-Harrison, a name I must admit to not knowing before encountering here. Greten-Harrison is responsible for the restoration of the original film orchestrations (more on that mammoth task shortly) as well as providing a wonderfully detailed, extensive and enthusiastic liner booklet…oh and he sings the baritone roles really well with a great natural sense of period style and easy skill. But then so do all the other singers — I find it a genuine joy to hear these songs sung in such an apt and unforced way. All of the singers understand the key technical premise of this type of singing; allow the microphone to do the work. Contemporary pop and theatre singing would have you believe that the more you belt the more emotion you are conveying. Time and again the singing on this set proves that not forcing allows for subtler nuances in both the singing and the word-pointing. 

Add to that the accompaniment of the BBC Concert Orchestra who again have this style in their back pockets, the BBC Singers — who a year ago were due to be axed — all under the skilled baton of David Charles Abell…the versions here have a nonchalant ease and stylish swing…the icing on the cake is Dutton’s sophisticated SACD engineering in the ideally generous acoustic of the Watford Colosseum. The production has placed the solo voices relatively forward and close in the final mix but I hear this as a recreation of the balances on the original soundtracks.

The “fate” of the music libraries of the big Hollywood studios is well-known but bears brief repetition. Through accident, design and simple short-sighted stupidity many of the original scores and orchestral parts for films — musical or dramatic — were destroyed once it was perceived that such music would never be required again. Many scores that did survive are either incomplete or damaged. Greten-Harrison relates MGM consigning the original scores for The Wizard of Oz and Singin’ in the Rain literally to landfill. By any measure that is cultural vandalism. Enter the musical restorers who piece together physical materials along with transcribing what can be heard on surviving soundtracks to allow modern audiences to enjoy — as near as can be told — what was originally created. Over the years there have been many fine restorers from the great Christopher Palmer to John Wilson…and now Greten-Harrison must be added to the list. Alongside the familiar names of the composers featured here the liner lists a further twelve Arranger/Orchestrators. It can be argued that it is these musicians who most clearly shaped the “Hollywood Sound” and aficionados will be delighted to see Pete King, Alfred Newman, David Raksin, Gene Rose and Conrad Salinger included here. Greten-Harrison quotes Harry Warren as saying; “the pictures may be old junk, but, damn it, the songs still go on.” That is exactly what this album triumphantly proves with every single track.

So to the programme. Disc 1 opens with the complete score for the 1945 musical film State Fair. This is notable in that it is the only musical Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein wrote explicitly for film. As with many musical films (as opposed to Film Musicals) the score in totality is quite short — here nine cues totaling just around 26:30. Given the massive success of the 1943 Oklahoma! and roughly similar Mid-Western locations it’s no surprise that both scores share a similar good-natured spirit. The score contains two enduring/familiar hits; “It Might as Well Be Spring” and “It’s a Grand Night for Singing,” with the former being the Oscar-winning song of 1945. There is so much to delight in with these performances. Take “It Might as Well Be Spring” as an exemplar of just about any song across the pair of discs; not only does Scarlett Strallen sing it with real style and vocal beauty but it’s a pleasure to hear the proper full orchestral introductions, the verses (not just the familiar chorus) as well as the so effective instrumental underscores and reprises as they occur in the film. I do not think I have ever watched State Fair in full so there are several songs new to me. Clare Teal — with her jazz background — is able to give “That’s for Me” an easy laid-back sexy swing that is just perfect.

This is also where David Charles Abell hits exactly the right tempo and feel and I just love the orchestration — most of this score is the work of Edward [Powell] so the bank of saxophones and descanting strings register perfectly. Quite possibly the cheesiest song is the hilariously rhymed “All I Owe Iowa” which includes the immortal lyric; “I owe Ioway for her ham, and her beef and her lamb, and her strawberry jam, and her pie. I owe Ioway more than I can ever pay so I think I’ll move to Californ-i-ay!” In fairness this is clearly intended to be rather naff with the point rammed home with an orchestration that includes 4 ocarinas, 3 harmonicas, a mouth harp and an accordion. A nice touch in the booklet is that the entire BBC Concert Orchestra is listed — including all the instruments above. As an aside — some of these orchestrations are profligate in the extreme — there is a contra-alto clarinet which I have no idea what it is or how it sounds! Six saxophones, keyboard, celeste and Compton organ, banjo, guitar and mandolin, 2 harps and oboe d’amore also add their distinctive timbres amongst much else.

The remainder of disc 1 contains selections from films whose titles might be unfamiliar but whose composers most certainly are not. The five selections from Centennial Summer are all by one of the greatest of all composers in this genre — Jerome Kern. The best known single song from this film is the Hammerstein collaboration “All Through the Day”…[here] in its original key for a tenor [James Taylor]…”For You, For Me, For Evermore” from The Shocking Miss Pilgrim…is a stunningly beautiful song by George and Ira Gershwin that is all but unknown….The final featured film of this first disc is Three Little Girls in Blue with a score by Josef Myrow and Mack Gordon. Again if the names are not familiar at least one of the songs, “You Make Me Feel So Young,” will be.  In this instance the song became famous a decade after its film debut when taken up by Sinatra in an arrangement by Nelson Riddle on the classic Songs for Swinging Lovers album. So quite an ear-opener and fascinating revelation to hear it as originally conceived as a peppy cut-time duet complete with interlude from shimmering heavenly chorus leading into an extended dance break and up-tempo chorus ending before fading into the sunset. All five of the selections from Three Little Girls in Blue are rather wonderful with the ear-tickling waltz melody of “On the Boardwalk” becoming a beautiful gentle introduction to “Somewhere in the Night.” It is the sophistication of this reprising of material and the skill with which the orchestrators transform the music that registers again and again across the whole set. Interesting to see that often a single song is the work of two or three arrangers. In part this can be a simple necessity of limited time but also it reflects the fact that there would be arrangers who specialised in vocal arranging or the dance breaks.

Disc two consists of twenty titles with exactly half written by Harry Warren. But before that the BBC Concert Orchestra get a chance to show off with the great Main Title from Love is a Many-Splendored Thing in a rousing arrangement of that well-known Sammy Fain tune. Warren belongs to that select(?) group of composers whose songs are universally known but the writers are not…I really enjoyed Scarlett Strallen’s singing of “My Heart tells Me” from Sweet Rosie O’Grady which epitomises the high production values of both the original song and its recreation here. But much the same can be said of all the song choices. “In the Middle of Nowhere” — a Jimmy McHugh song from Something for the Boys — shows the Fox Music Department deploying its full resources from another “heavenly chorus” introduction leading into a sax and trombone led verse for the male lead before a gear change modulation into the female verse replete with swooning strings. For sure this has become a cliché sound but important to remember these are the writers and arrangers who created this style and it only became clichéd through decades of emulation.

A Warren song I did not know was “Run, Little Raindrop, Run” from the 1942 Springtime in the Rockies. This is one of two tracks where the “resident” four vocal soloists are joined by Michael Feinstein. The majority of songs on this second disc tend towards being swinging ballads with or without dance breaks but this is a fun “novelty” number aided by a witty orchestration and lyrics by Mack Gordon…Feinstein is of course a master of the genre but he does not seek to dominate the song or the performance here. Across this second disc Derek Greten-Harrison has the bulk of the singing duties appearing on nine tracks all of which he sings with an easy and natural sense of phrase and warm vocal tone. Another unfamiliar highlight for me was “How Blue the Night” from Four Jills in a Jeep. This starts off as a fairly formulaic ballad but then morphs into an extended dance break with a beguine treatment, string waltz — more heavenly singing in tow — a soft-shoe and an up-tempo “big finish” before Greten-Harrison returns with cherubic contributions from swooning BBC Singers. In a single number is encapsulated everything I love about this style of song treatment and its recreation here. Again worth repeating just how “right” David Charles Abell’s handling of all these scores is. The sheer lavishness of the production underlines the resources available to the studios at the time but also why it is so hard/expensive to recreate them again today….

Greater aficionados than I in the field of 40’s and 50’s musicals will know many more of these films. Apart from An Affair to Remember and Three Coins in the Fountain I have to say they are all new to me — and by title alone Doll Face or Mother Wore Tights hardly set the pulse racing….What [this release] achieves with great success is to celebrate the breadth of creative and performing talent at work across an enormous range of films in Hollywood in the 1940’s and 50’s. Interestingly the album ends with the poignant and moving You’ll Never Know [one final Harry Warren gem] from Hello, Frisco, Hello which Clare Teal sings with exactly the right warmth and sentiment even if she cannot quite match Alice Faye’s absurdly charismatic singing in the original film.  But it makes musical sense to round off the set with another Oscar-winning “best song” presented in a Conrad Salinger arrangement.

As should be clear by now, I consider this set a considerable triumph in every respect. As well as the extended, informative liner note, the booklet includes several session photographs as well as the usual artist biographies. A notable feature is the extended list of credits which underline just how much time (10 years in the making), care and effort has gone into this project. Musicological rigour and historically informed performing practices are things usually associated with earlier genres of music and composers. But all the same skills and attention to detail are required — and delivered — here. I can understand that this style of music will not appeal to all listeners, but what cannot be denied is the exceptionally high level of insight and understanding brought to this project. Dutton have a catalogue rich in re-releases of classic original cast recordings of shows and films but I am not sure that they have been responsible for a new studio recording of this style of music before so that is to be applauded and celebrated too….

The great delight of this new set is to hear mainly unfamiliar songs sung so idiomatically in their original glorious arrangements. Now if only the RKO Songbook or MGM Songbook could follow as well………?!

—Nick Barnard

Fanfare (May 2024): Delicious songs from 20th Century-Fox’s golden age musicals in restored original orchestrations give much pleasure

After looking at the booklet cover, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this release is primarily about songs and singers…it is, however, equally about orchestrators and orchestrations, even though that is less “sexy” to most people than singing is. What we have here, then, is a program of songs originally heard in movie musicals released by 20th Century-Fox in the 1940s and 1950s, and performed in their original orchestrations as restored by Derek Greten-Harrison, who also sings many of them here. Most of these original orchestrations have never been released in stereo, so this is an opportunity to hear, in modern multi-channel sound, what good work was done by studio arrangers or orchestrators such as Conrad Salinger, Alfred Newman, David Raksin, and Paul Weston…

…I don't want to judge movies I have yet to see, and probably never will—there are only so many hours in a day—but even the composers associated with these films thought that many of the films were trivial. If these films still are watched today, it is because of the stars and because of the songs. I was unfamiliar with about half of the songs in this collection. For every standard, such as Three Coins in the Fountain and It Might as Well Be Spring, there are songs that are much rarer, and most of them are swell. They do not deserve to be forgotten. I've been listening to this release for two or three days, and Run, Little Raindrop, Run (from Springtime in the Rockies, and originally sung by Grable and Payne) is firmly lodged in my head, not least because of Alfred Newman's [sic] cheerful arrangement of Harry Warren's tune. Once that song is dislodged, another one will take its place. In other words, unless you've spent the past several decades glued to the American Movie Classics channel, there is plenty here that will be new to you, but I think you will like it very much.…

Even in conventional stereo, the recorded sound is gorgeous. Vocals are closely recorded, as they were on the movie soundtracks….

—Raymond Tuttle