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Street Scene: An American Opera
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Street Scene: An American Opera

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Street Scene: An American Opera
Music Price: $9.99
As of Jan 7 17:58 EST (details)

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StudioSony
Release DateOctober 25, 1990
UPC Code074644466829
Buy this item$9.99 at Amazon.com
As of Jan 7 17:58 EST (details)
1 Audio CD, Usually ships in 24 hours, Cast Recording
 

About Street Scene: An American Opera

Kurt Weill harbored ambitions to compose the great American opera in the public, populist forum of Broadway, much as Gershwin did with Porgy and Bess. He did so in the 1947 Street Scene, which is a three-hour panorama of working-class American life revolving around a woman in an abusive marriage who is murdered for seeking comfort elsewhere. Weill never demonstrated a more remarkable fluency in a range of popular music style, but the piece's somewhat dated (and deliberate) sense of dramaturgy is apparent in this single disc of excerpts, performed in the comparatively reserved Broadway style of the 1940s. Though Langston Hughes's lyrics capture the Edward Hopperesque loneliness of those times, they can also be cloyingly bald. Weill's combination of pop-music manner and Puccinian operatic grandeur has since been more cohesively negotiated. However, excerpts this extensive would have been possible only in the dawn of the LP era, with cast members Anne Jeffreys, Polyna Stoska, and Brian Sullivan showing how this piece's journey started. --David Patrick Stearns Amazon.com essential recording

Tracks

  1. Prelude
  2. Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed
  3. Ain't It Awful, the Heat
  4. Blues: I Got a Marble and a Star
  5. Gossip Trio: Get a Load of That
  6. Arietta: When a Woman Has a Baby
  7. Aria: Somehow I Never Could Believe
  8. Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow
  9. Arioso: Lonely Home
  10. Scene and Song: Wouldn't You Like to Be on Broadway?
  11. Cavatina: What Good Would the Moon Be?
  12. Duet: Remember That I Care
  13. Introduction: Morning
  14. Children's Game
  15. Song: A Boy Like You
  16. Duet: We'll Go Away Together
  17. Choral Scene and Lament: The Woman Who Lived up There
  18. Lullaby
  19. Finale: I Loved Her Too
  20. Farewell Duet: Don't Forget the Lilac Bush

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User Reviews

Average user review: 4.5 (2 reviews)

rating: 4 QuoteStreet Scene: An American Musical/OperaQuote
I list this in both my Musicals and Opera.. I read a review , not of this production,, but of an operatic one , comparing it to "louise".. I'm amazed at how fast Weill adapted to the american idiom..I thinks his best work was with Brecht and Ira Gershwin.. that being said.. this is a good recording encouraging me to see,, if I can find one, a production..
Anne Jefferies,, I believe was in a revival of kismet and is georgeous.. August 16, 2006

rating: 5 QuoteA New concept of collaborationQuote
Larry Warren in his book :"Anna Sokolow The Rebellious Spirit" writes: "In "Oklahoma!" and "On the town",Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins had pioneered in the use of dance to further the plot of a musical, but their language was based on a ballet vocabulary. In Street Scene Anna proved that Social-dance forms have an inherent dramatic powers when they are artfully used as an expression of the society that created them. Ten years later Robbins used his genius to bring this concept to its fullest expression on Broadway in West Side Story". May 18, 2000

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