Harbinger Records

01/07/2022

AVAILABLE TODAY: "ROSE-MARIE" STARRING RON RAINES!

Today Harbinger releases its second collaboration with the Smithsonian: the 1981 recording of the classic 1924 operetta ROSE-MARIE, starring Debra Vanderlinde and Broadway’s Ron Raines, and featuring Laura Waterbury and Mark Basile. It is the only complete recording of the score, with music by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart and lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II. James R. Morris is the conductor. The Harbinger CD set marks the first release in any format of this historic recording—following the reissue last year of the Smithsonian’s NAUGHTY MARIETTA.

ROSE-MARIE was the first American musical with a Canadian locale—the Canadian Rockies, to be precise—and includes such evergreen numbers at “Indian Love Call” (“When I’m calling you, ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo”), “Pretty Things,” “Only a Kiss” and the stirring title song. Broadway audiences flocked to ROSE-MARIE for 557 performances, making it the fourth longest-running musical of the 1920s.

To order, go to https://naxosdirect.com/items/rose-marie-572617
....

A must for collectors and all fans of both the American musical and classical music, Rose-Marie has been packaged in a deluxe two-CD set with historic production photos and notes by two longtime Harbinger colleagues: co-producer Dwight Blocker Bowers, curator emeritus of the Smithsonian, and Ted Chapin, recently retired president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization.

Says Bowers: “It’s not an overstatement to claim that Rose-Marie was the first American musical theater work to achieve wide international success. In his review of the original production, Arthur Hornblow in Theatre magazine praised it for being ‘head, shoulders and waist above the customary dribble.’ When the Smithsonian’s recordings program was suspended, the unreleased Rose-Marie was a casualty, and I was given the chance to rescue the master tapes. Hence the collaboration with Harbinger, whose slogan is apt: Albums for the discerning collector.”

Adds Ted Chapin: “Good operetta—and Rose-Marie is exactly that—is good theater, albeit of another era. Yes, the first syllables of the genre led the way—as in opera, music in operetta always comes first. And composer Friml, along with Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg, was a master of sumptuous melody. It’s wonderful to have this score in all its splendor.”

Now, 98 years after its Broadway premiere, Rose-Marie is ready to be rediscovered by future generations in this historic 1981 recording.

To order, go to https://naxosdirect.com/items/rose-marie-572617

Harbinger Records is proud to present its second partnership with the Smithsonian: the first release in any format of their 1981 production of the classic opere

11/30/2021

All of us at Harbinger Records and The Musical Theater Project are deeply saddened by the death of Stephen Sondheim. Below is a blog originally posted in March 2020.

SO HAPPY TO MAKE HIS ACQUAINTANCE
A Blog on the Occasion of Stephen Sondheim’s 90th Birthday (2020)
By Bill Rudman

No doubt there have been hundreds of us—men and women who found the confidence to make a career in musical theater thanks to Stephen Sondheim’s generosity of spirit and dedication to teaching.

I bet I’m typical. I wrote to him in 1969, when I was an 18-year-old living in a small town in Ohio. Topic: Anyone Can Whistle. I sent him a blank reel-to-reel tape, asking him (what chutzpah!) to respond to my questions. Lo and behold, he brought in Arthur Laurents so they could do it together, with Sondheim commenting that since I was writing “a master’s thesis” (!), he felt I deserved the “most pretentious possible reply.” (High praise indeed from Sondheim.)

I promise you I didn’t misrepresent myself—but for whatever reason, he took me seriously, and our correspondence officially began. Two years later, I was teaching a course in musical theater history while a student at a tiny Ohio college. Displaying more chutzpah, I invited him to speak to my class, but though he declined (graciously explaining that he hated to fly), he invited me to interview him at his Turtle Bay townhouse. In 1973 he even invited me to attend the recording session for A Little Night Music. I took notes! Nirvana! And after the epic 14-hour session, he took me and a friend of his out for a nightcap across the street from the Columbia Records studio.

Then in 1975, when I was working for Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, he gave us the first non-aquatic rights to do The Frogs. He and Burt Shevelove made revisions, and we premiered the heart-piercing Sondheim-Shakespeare song, “Fear No More.”

By 1979, I was living and working in Manhattan—and I decided not to trouble him further (except sporadically!). Forty-one years later, I’m artistic director of The Musical Theater Project, an educational nonprofit in Cleveland. We have a national record label, Harbinger Records,
and a few years ago I asked him to do a liner note for a CD retrospective on Hugh Martin,
a songwriter I knew he admired.

Amazingly he remembered me and wrote a splendid note. In gratitude I sent him a CD we had produced of piano rolls that nobody knew existed, recorded in the 1920s by Richard Rodgers,
and I finally had the chance to teach him something.

In 1994 New York Magazine famously asked, “Is Stephen Sondheim God”? It’s my favorite rhetorical question.

Happy Birthday to the godlike man who believed in me…

07/23/2021

ZING! ZING! RAVES FOR HARBINGER
REISSUE OF “NAUGHTY MARIETTA”

Our recent rerelease of the 1981 Smithsonian recording of Victor Herbert and Rida Johnson Young’s NAUGHTY MARIETTA is getting great buzz from record lovers, including Talkin’ Broadway music critic Rob Lester: “With a young star-on-the-rise Judy Blazer in the title role, [this] splendid version, sung with vitality and panache, is reissued for the first time in CD and digital formats. With 21 tracks, it’s sumptuous.”
Hear a sneak peek of "Italian Street Song" on our website https://www.musicaltheaterproject.org/naughtymariettahcd3702
then buy a copy on Amazon for your collection: https://amzn.to/3bxssVM

06/25/2021

AVAILABLE TODAY - VICTOR HERBERT'S NAUGHTY MARIETTA
ON CD FOR THE FIRST TIME!

Harbinger Records is pleased to announce the reissue—for the first time on CD—of the Smithsonian Institution Archives' 1981 recording of Naughty Marietta, starring Judith Blazer and Leslie Harrington and conducted by James R. Morris.

Composer Victor Herbert’s greatest achievement was this beloved classic of American operetta, first produced on Broadway in 1910. The tale of an Italian countess who stows away on a ship to New Orleans, where she falls in love with a frontiersman, it was adapted multiples times—most notably for the 1935 film with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy and a 1955 live telecast with Patrice Munsel and Alfred Drake—but these adaptations played fast and loose with Naughty Marietta’s story and music.

In 1981, the Smithsonian’s American Musical Theater series produced the first studio recording of the complete score of Naughty Marietta following semi-staged performances of the operetta at Baird Auditorium, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in D.C., giving fans the opportunity to hear it exactly as it was written by Herbert and librettist-lyricist Rida Johnson Young.

“All the flavor and excitement of the work have been captured alive,” wrote Washington Post arts critic Octavio Roca. “Blazer is magnificent in the title role. She is a crystal-clear lyric soprano. Her Marietta is sexy. Her comic timing is the best, her naughtiness always tongue in cheek. Here was a star the audience would have gladly listened to all night.”

Now, with Harbinger’s reissue of this historic recording, you can listen all night to such beautiful, haunting songs as “’Neath the Southern Moon,” “Italian Street Song,” “Live for Today,” “I’m Falling in Love With Someone” and “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.”

This CD, produced by Ken Bloom and Dwight Blocker Bowers, includes a 20-page booklet with extensive essays and color photos, plus an interview with Judy Blazer.

Hear a sneak peek of "Italian Street Song" on our website https://www.musicaltheaterproject.org/naughtymariettahcd3702
then buy a copy on Amazon for your collection: https://amzn.to/3bxssVM

06/04/2021

WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT "SHUFFLE ALONG"?

100 years ago, this groundbreaking show by an all-Black creative team introduced Jazz to Broadway and changed the face of the American musical forever. "Shuffle Along" was as revolutionary and impactful in its day as Hamilton has been in ours. Read more about it here... https://www.npr.org/2021/05/23/998962830/shuffle-along-changed-musical-theater-100-years-ago
..then take a listen to the ONLY available archival recording of this groundbreaking musical, put out by Harbinger Records, which also won the 2017 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes!

https://www.musicaltheaterproject.org/sissle--blake-sing-shuffle-along.html

05/25/2021

PRE-ORDER OUR NEWEST RELEASE COMING JUNE 25th:
VICTOR HERBERT'S NAUGHTY MARIETTA - FIRST TIME ON CD!

Harbinger Records is pleased to announce the reissue—for the first time on CD—of the Smithsonian Institution Archives 1981 recording of Naughty Marietta, starring Judith Blazer and Leslie Harrington and conducted by James R. Morris.

Composer Victor Herbert’s greatest achievement was this beloved classic of American operetta, first produced on Broadway in 1910. The tale of an Italian countess who stows away on a ship to New Orleans, where she falls in love with a frontiersman, it was adapted multiples times—most notably for the 1935 film with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy and a 1955 live NBC telecast with Patrice Munsel and Alfred Drake—but these adaptations played fast and loose with Naughty Marietta’s story and music.

In 1981, the Smithsonian’s American Musical Theater series produced the first studio recording of the complete score of Naughty Marietta following semi-staged performances of the operetta at Baird Auditorium, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in D.C., giving fans the opportunity to hear it exactly as it was written by Herbert and librettist-lyricist Rida Johnson Young.

“All the flavor and excitement of the work have been captured alive,” wrote Washington Post arts critic Octavio Roca. “Blazer is magnificent in the title role. She is a crystal-clear lyric soprano. Her Marietta is sexy. Her comic timing is the best, her naughtiness always tongue in cheek. Here was a star the audience would have gladly listened to all night.”

Now, with Harbinger’s reissue of this historic recording, you can listen all night to such beautiful, haunting songs as “’Neath the Southern Moon,” “Italian Street Song,” “Live for Today,” “I’m Falling in Love With Someone” and “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.”

This CD, produced by Ken Bloom and Dwight Blocker Bowers, includes a 20-page booklet with extensive essays and color photos, plus an interview with Judy Blazer.

Hear a sneak peek of "Italian Street Song" on our website https://www.musicaltheaterproject.org/naughtymariettahcd3702-70223.html
then pre-order it on Amazon for your collection: https://amzn.to/3bxssVM

The street date of the release is June 25, 2021.

04/16/2021

INTRODUCING THE RECORDING DEBUT OF ANAÏS RENO -
RELEASED TODAY!

Harbinger Records is proud to announce the extraordinary recording debut of jazz phenomenon Anaïs Reno, recorded in 2020 when she was 16 years old. Reno has already won accolades for her dedication to The Great American Songbook. She recently received the Julie Wilson Award, and in 2019 won the The Mabel Mercer Foundation competition for high school students

Read more about Anaïs, listen FOR FREE to two tracks from the new album and find the link to purchase on our website. This recording is an instant classic you won't want to miss!

https://www.musicaltheaterproject.org/anaisrenohcd3701.html