Search - Ohio Light Opera :: Jerome Kern: The Cabaret Girl

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Mr Lapin | Ohio, USA | 07/11/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"The Cabaret Girl is not quite operetta, not quite musical comedy, and Ohio Light Opera's singers mostly tread that line fairly well, at least to my ears. Some listeners who are arriving here from the musical comedy side of the fence may find them a bit more operatic than they like.



On the whole the orchestra does a serviceable job. However, without the visual elements of the live performance, their limitations are sometimes a bit too apparent. There are moments where rhythm and intonation falter.



Bear in mind that for this work you don't have a lot of choice. As far as I can tell it's largely been neglected since its 1922 English success. There were no known US performances until 2004, in San Francisco. That performance wasn't recorded in its entirety (or at least not all of it has been released), so as far as I know this is the first and only complete recording in the original orchestration.



Now, about the download format. I should mention first that if you're seeing this on the CD page, there's apparently an error in the mp3 link; it leads to the download of something else, not this work. If you want the download, you may have to search for it from the Amazon homepage. Search only for the title, not composer; apparently the mp3 search system doesn't know that Jerome Kern composed Cabaret Girl.



I've previously downloaded mostly pop music, not classical, from Amazon. This is the first time I've tried downloading a work of this type, and I'll think twice before I do so again. It demonstrates the limitations of the dominant song-oriented download model when applied to classical music (and I'll bet some pop music too).



The CD's tracking is apparently mainly for convenience; in most cases the audio continues right through the track break. Alas, Amazon's mp3 encoder treats each track as a separate entity. Worse, it adds a quarter-second or so of silence at the beginning and end of each cut. When I loaded all the mp3 files into a playlist, I heard an annoying and distracting break between selections.



It's not just my player, it's really in the mp3 files. I confirmed this by decoding them to wave files and viewing them in an audio editor.



That editor was also the solution to the problem. I loaded in all the decoded wave files, end to end. Then I edited out the silences (very time-consuming), and saved the result as 3 long wave files, one for each act. Then I burned them to a CD for listening. I suppose I could have re-encoded them to mp3, but then I would have lost a bit of audio quality.



Editing that way did deal with the gaps, but it was too much time and effort. Next time I'll pay the few extra dollars for the CD, and get the nice graphics to boot.



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