Kurt Weill - Street Scene - Hollywood Bowl, 1949

"Street Scene" is a Broadway musical or, more precisely, an "American opera" by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). Written in 1946 and premiered in Philadelphia that year, Street Scene is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Rice.

It was Weill who referred to the piece as an "American opera" (he also called it a "Broadway opera"), intending it as a synthesis of European traditional opera and American musical theater. He received the first Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work, after the Broadway premiere in 1947. Yet Street Scene has never been revived on Broadway; it is fairly regularly produced by opera companies. Musically and culturally, even dramatically, the work inhabits the midground between Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928) and Bernstein's West Side Story (1957).

The score contains operatic arias and ensembles, some of them, such as Anna Maurrant's "Somehow I Never Could Believe" and Frank Maurrant's "Let Things Be Like They Always Was," with links and references to the style of Giacomo Puccini. It also has jazz and blues influences, in "I Got a Marble and a Star" and "Lonely House." Some of the more Broadway-style musical numbers are "Wrapped In a Ribbon and Tied In a Bow", "Wouldn't You Like To Be On Broadway?" and "Moon-faced, Starry-eyed," an extended song-and-dance sequence.

This is a rare recording of Kurt Weill’s musical, Street Scene, taken from a performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 1949, and featuring Polyna Stoska, who created the work’s leading role.

It was intended for overseas broadcast by the Armed Forces Radio, the present disc including just seventeen tracks of vocal music and omits all of the linking narrative. That leaves little more than half of the original that started life as a Broadway musical in 1947, but with so much competition at the time, it enjoyed modest success.

The plot concerns the everyday life of six couples from differing nationalities who live in the close confines of a tenement block in New York. It opens in a workaday atmosphere, the young ones longing for something better, but are unable to break out of their humdrum existence. Anna Maurrant tries to protect her children from a bullying husband, and out of her mundane life emerges her own need for romance which she finds it in Steve. By chance her husband comes home unexpectedly early and finding them together kills them in a jealous rage. The end of the work sees life in the tenement slowly returning to normal. Dorothy Sarnoff sings the part of Rose Maurrant, the smart girl who is capable of escaping from the tenement, and it is with her the performance comes to life. The remainder of the cast is routine, though it probably portrays the work as it sounded on Broadway, and is much different to the two modern complete recordings that use casts of opera singers. This original recording is of haphazard balance and prone to overlading, but the restoration engineer has worked miracles.

This version of Street Scene was part of a two-hour concert broadcast live from the Hollywood Bowl and recorded by the Armed Forces Radio Service, who pressed it on sixteen-inch transcription discs. Program host Jack Little, not heard here, described the proceedings and introduced the performers but said nothing about the plot or characters, and in fact we’ve had to make educated guesses concerning a couple of numbers he did not announce. He also apologized to the radio audience after the opening number because one microphone failed to work, leaving the vocal ensemble almost inaudible.

Kurt Weill - Street Scene - Hollywood Bowl, 1949
(192 kbps, cover art included)