John Wilson started off as a conductor of musical theatre, and made his name in concert performances of Broadway shows. After relaunching the hand-picked Sinfonia of London in 2018 he has gone on to success in a much wider repertoire, but as this recording of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Oklahoma! demonstrates, Wilson has maintained his connections with the world from which his career was launched.
Though it is recognised as a milestone in the development of the Broadway musical – the first collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the work which first gave the genre real dramatic and musical coherence – Oklahoma! has never been recorded complete before. The original orchestration by Robert Russell Bennett has been reconstructed (though with much of the spoken text from Hammerstein’s book omitted) so that Wilson conducts exactly what the audience would have heard on the opening night in New York in 1943. It’s as scrupulously prepared as any historically informed baroque performance, using an orchestra of the same size as the original pit band, and recovering every morsel of Rodgers’s score, including all the reprises and interludes, as well as the whole of the Dream Ballet that ends the first act.
There are one or two moments when the action seems to hang fire, prompting the feeling that utter completeness isn’t always desirable, but everything is played with such energy and purpose that those feelings are quickly swept away. The tone is set in the opening moments of the overture, attacked by the strings of the Sinfonia of London with brilliant precision, but the reflective moments of the score are treated with equal care. Sometimes the sheer quality of the orchestral playing threatens to overshadow the singers, but led by Nathaniel Hackmann as Curly and Sierra Boggess as Laurey, with Rodney Earl Clarke as Jud Fry, the cast seems to have been prepared as meticulously as every other aspect of the performance.
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This week’s other pick
Rodgers and Hammerstein are also represented on The Sound of Movies, the latest cross-over venture on Sony Classical from Jonas Kaufmann. Partnered by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra under Jochen Rieder, with the guitarist Milos Karadaglic recruited for four of the tracks, the 22 songs are a multilingual mix of numbers from original film scores and others that began life on the stage. Some are better known than others – there’s Love Story’s Where Do I Begin? and Moon River from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Cinema Paradiso’s Se and What a Wonderful World from Good Morning, Vietnam, while the performances range from a touchingly direct version of Maria from West Side Story, to a distinctly mannered You’ll Never Walk Alone from Carousel, which Kaufmann delivers in an oddly halting way. Good singing mingles with pure schmaltz, though the tenor’s fans will surely lap it all up.
