Studio recording

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The term studio recording means any recording made in a studio, as opposed to a live recording, which is usually made in a concert venue or a theatre, with an audience attending the performance.

In the case of Broadway musicals, the term studio cast recording applies to a recording of the show which does not feature the cast of either a stage production or film version of the show.

The practice has existed since before the advent of Broadway cast albums in 1943, when the songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, performed by the show's cast, were released on a multi-record 78-RPM album by American Decca. (London original cast albums have existed since the early days of recording, however, and there are recordings in existence of excerpts from such shows as The Desert Song, Sunny, and Show Boat, all performed by their original London stage casts.)

History

Before 1943, musicals were recorded in the U.S. with studio casts, although in many cases, such as those of Walter Huston from Knickerbocker Holiday and Helen Morgan from Show Boat, singer-actors from a musical did make recordings of songs from the shows they appeared in. Another such example is Ethel Merman, who recorded virtually all of the songs that she made famous, even when there was no original Broadway cast album of a smash hit that she had starred in, as is the case with Anything Goes. Paul Robeson, who appeared in several productions of Show Boat (though not the original Broadway production), made many recordings of the song Ol' Man River from the show.

Also beginning in 1943, current revivals of musicals began to be recorded with their original casts, a custom that persists today. Therefore, we have recordings of the 1943 cast of Rodgers and Hart's A Connecticut Yankee, the 1946 cast of Kern and Hammerstein's Show Boat and the 1951 cast of George and Ira Gershwin's Of Thee I Sing, all of them pre-1943 musicals.

Studio cast recordings have become especially useful in the era of compact discs after being overshadowed for years by original cast albums - in nearly all cases, moderate to large amounts of songs (or instrumental music) were left out of original cast albums of older shows because there was simply no room for all of them on a single LP, even one that lasted 50 minutes. The extended length of a typical CD makes it possible to include all the songs and music from one show on one or more discs, and studio casts have had to be the ones to record new albums of older shows, since, in many cases, original cast members are either long retired or have passed away.

In the past, studio cast albums have almost invariably used different orchestrations and vocal arrangements from those heard in the show, but with interest growing in the way shows from the past first sounded on Broadway, these albums are now nearly always recorded using the original orchestral and vocal arrangements of the shows in question, especially after the 1982 discovery in a Secaucus, New Jersey Warner Bros. warehouse of the original manuscripts of many classic Broadway shows in their original orchestrations. One such example is the aforementioned Of Thee I Sing, which was recorded on CD with its original orchestrations and vocal arrangements for the first time in 1987, featuring a cast headed by Larry Kert and Maureen McGovern.

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Last updated on Wednesday March 05, 2008 at 09:29:34 PST (GMT -0800)
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