There has been much discussion here about the music that gets the show going, some of which has addressed the ‘Mont Blanc’ of Broadway overtures, that to The King and I.
Above Ken Watanabe and Kelli O’Hara in 2015 Broadway’s sexy production of The King and I, my beloved Brit John Wilson conducts his John Wilson Orchestra in the Albert Hall in the Overture.
Amusingly, orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett tagged it ‘Le roi et moi’. One can only imagine whom the ‘roi’ is meant to be. However, those of you who have come across the French will also be familiar perhaps with this expression, typically seen in a famous cartoon set in a restaurant where a waiter is dealing with a complaint from a diner: ‘Le client est roi: le patron est dieu’ [The customer is king; the boss is god].
Anyway, like Mont Blanc, there are different ways up it (and back down again), which vary according to how much snow and ice or wind or wet or hot weather have to be negotiated. A lot of versions of score, arrangement and style of performance can be heard, and they are all interesting. At this present moment, however, I am quite taken with Lesko’s 1977 recording, under Milt Rosenstock’s supervision, of a truly involving reading of the overture. Their approach is intensely ‘musical’ and it triumphs for that reason, whatever differences there may be in substance compared with other performances.
How do I judge this? I put myself in the shoes of someone who has turned up to the theatre and knows the name of the show (this is now frequently projected onto a drop curtain at the start, to help the slow-witted) and nothing else. The King and I is a very sensible title, presenting two ideas: royalty and an anonymous first-person narrator. Royalty is far away from the experience of most people, but it is recognised as being an ‘absolute’ beyond which further progress cannot be expected: ergo, a ‘King’ doesn’t usually have much to strive for, no goal to reach, and thus tends to make for a bad protagonist (unless you’re watching them fall!). Therefore, subconsciously the audience is already rooting for the unidentified ‘I’. (Incidentally, the heroine narrator of Rebecca is only identified by that single letter, and there are other examples.)
What then follows is something that appears to be an ‘overture’ in the Broadway manner, comprising a list of big tunes from the upcoming entertainment. Subconsciously, though, it can also be read as a programmatic tone-poem offering a summary of the events leading up to the start of the drama proper. My hypothetical punter might understand it as follows:
1) The Hammer-Blows of Fate fall and send everything flying—these are the two musical ideas out of which the rest of the overture (and score) is constructed
2) Melancholic love arises, moving slowly, chordally, perhaps recalling a lost romance, maybe a death
3) Sudden change of mood interrupts this and jerks us into youthful, childlike chirpiness, which jars
4) An abrupt relapse follows into deeper desires, barely grasped, but insistent, driven by powerfully expressed longing, yearning
5) Gently undulating movements surge forward in the bass and high strings, with a long tune bobbing rhythmically through them, rather like a sea voyage
6) Triple-time acceleration of the ‘journey’ then propels us along faster, where the steady treading of chords and the opening scales have been brought much closer together, yet without quite actually joining, before the music culminates in—
7) Arrival at the destination, announced by a more emphatic restatement of the opening grand chords. Curtain up on ship arriving in Bangkok Harbour.
Or something like that.
To be perfectly honest, the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde does the same thing. The whole is held together by the orchestration, which is phenomenal. Furthermore, in the same way as one does not need to ‘know’ what Wagner’s four-note rising and falling and rising chromatic motifs ‘mean’ in order to ‘feel’ their tidal effect, nor to feel in one’s very marrow what those ‘tides’ relate to in oneself, it is immaterial what specific incidents have brought ‘I’ to this place. A closer musical theatre example might be for some the overture to The Mikado, perhaps; in terms of musical complexity it is less challenging although it certainly seems to begin similarly, but the emotional depth of R&H far exceeds that of the skilful D’Oyly Carte parodists.
Crucially, Rodgers draws on the big guns of the past to learn from them; Sullivan plunders his predecessors in order to send them up.
Here, because of the terseness of the musical argument, the best performances are those which are most involved in the ‘music’ to the exclusion of any ‘intrusive phrasing’. I mean by this, musical phrasing which seems to articulate the sense of the ‘text’: Particularly when dealing with a very familiar score, any approach at conducting ‘the big tune’ runs the risk of simply luring the audience into ‘singing-along’: and how they do. In fact, once they feel they have ‘permission’ to do this, there is no knowing when the audience might feel moved to accompany ANY member of the cast in whatever they have to sing. I have lost count of the number of productions I’ve seen where this occurs. However, I have also paid careful attention to when it does NOT happen.
In this single example, then, an excellent rendition of the overture—or prelude—to The King and I. Some people may find this approach at analysis unnecessarily fussy if not a tad precious; on the other hand, there might be some mileage in it.
~Julian Eaves, Composer from Musical Theatre Orchestrations
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 