Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Gilbert & Sullivan: The Gondoliers

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Summertime is always a great time to broadcast one or another of the comic operas in the G & S canon. These lighthearted and ever tuneful works compliment, I say, the listener's vacationtime frame of mind. The Gondoliers (1889) was the last collaborative effort of the artistic partnership of librettist William S. Gilbert and and composer Sir Arthur Sullivan.

I have broadcast the same 1961 British Decca recording, featuring the singers and orchestra of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, several times in both its LP and CD releases over several decades of my tenure in the opera timeslot. The most recent time was on Sunday, July 13, 2005 in the 2003 CD reissue, which retained the complete recorded dialog. Their longtime orchestra leader Isadore Godfrey was in charge in so many recordings of the original D'Oyly Carte company, then still under the supervision of Richard D'Oyly Carte's daughter Bridget. Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895-1967) conducted for the company in its earliest recordings in the 1920's. His service as the company's conductor continued sporadically up to 1961. Sargent was able to bring out all the details in Sullivan's orchestral scoring. He employed his skills so well when he recorded the G & S canon in studio recordings in early stereo sound for EMI in the period 1957-63. These classic recordings,too, have graduated from LP into CD format. The 1958 EMI LP release of Yeomen of the Guard (1888) was reissued twice on CD in 1987 and again in 1992. Sargent conducted the Pro Arte Orchestra and Glyndebourne Festival Chorus, with a singing cast of English operatic greats who performed at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden. The separate CD issue of Sargent's Yeomen and its LP predecessor I have broadcast three times before.

But this Sunday I will be airing Sargent's Gondoliers, originally issued in 1957 and taken up into a Warner Classics 16 disc CD boxed set giving us Sargent's entire G & S stereo recorded output. The one drawback to the Warner reissue is that none of these historic recordings have any of Gilbert's witty spoken dialog.