PRESENTING HARBINGER’S NEWEST RELEASE!
TMTP/Harbinger Records is pleased to announce the release on of its second collaboration with the Smithsonian: the 1981 recording of the classic operetta Rose-Marie (1924), starring Debra Vanderlinde and Broadway’s Ron Raines. 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 (two decades before he began his famed partnership with Richard Rodgers). James R. Morris directed and conducted the operetta in a production that was performed in concert in Washington in October 1981.
The Harbinger CD set marks the first release in any format of this historic recording—following the label’s 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.
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. 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. 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 or to Amazon link
