Search - Douglas S. Moore, Emerson Buckley, New York City Opera Orchestra :: The Ballad of Baby Doe

Great Music, Theatre, & Performance historically important

William Birner | LaPlace, LA USA | 08/08/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I just recently stumbled on this re-release on CD. What a find. I had the fabulous fortune to work on two university theatre/music department productions of this work first as a theatre grad student in 1960 and later as a faculty designer in 1965 and to talk with Mr. Moore who visited with us at the '65 production. In between and later I got to see Central City (but not the production). Over the decades I have treasured and pampered my original LP set of this recording. Now I can listen with greater freedom. 1960 was my first discovery of Miss Sills. It also clinched my love of the Romantic in theatre, music and literature. Baby Doe is a great emotional story and Moore and Latouche captured the epic earthiness, foibles, tempo of it. For me it will always remain a great moment in musical theatre. If grand opera could do what this work has done for its audiences it would be more popular even in the U. S. As other have noted here, this recording is not an audiophile's modern dream. These older ears no longer care, as it is as mellow and rich as any listening experience of this work would want and at least allows clear focus on the voices of Sills, Cassel and Bible. It should be in the collection of everyone who cares about American Music and Theatre. The three lead artists are masterful in their portrayals and musically just right - indeed theatrically just right as well. More accessible than even Porgy in my mind, along with Gershwin's work it still moves me with its power as well as its beauty. As someone who never heard Baby Doe before seeing it performed, it is hard to guess at its impact on the "virginal" home listener. I would urge careful follow of the libretto and a wide sweep to the visual imagination as one listens to it."

At last!

William Birner | 05/18/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Fans of American opera and Beverly Sills have long dreamed of this great recording being reissued, and here at last it is: perhaps the most famous of American operas, and certainly one of Sills' finest showpieces. Although the music's melange of nineteenth-century American styles does not seem quite so fresh and startling as it did when the opera premiered in the Fifties, it still has some wonderful numbers that almost every opera fan knows (such as the Willow Song, the Letter aria, and "Warm as the autumn light"), and a superior libretto. Frances Bible is a terrific Augusta, perhaps the most difficult role in the show, and she is both frightening in her wrath at "Cold? Am I cold?," as well as very moving in her final soliloquy. Walter Cassel is also a fine Horace, but the honors really go to Sills, who of course owns for all time the role of Baby Doe. Although she does fine work with the florid Silver aria and Willow Song, she is perhaps even better in her quiter numbers, such as "I knew it was wrong" and the great final aria."