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  • Midnight Frolic: The Broadway Theater Music of Louis A. Hirsch
  • Jonas Westover
Midnight Frolic: The Broadway Theater Music of Louis A. Hirsch. The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. Rick Benjamin, director. Liner notes by Rick Benjamin. 2010. New World Records 80707–2.

The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra’s newest release celebrates the music of the composer Louis A. Hirsch, whose name was well known during the 1910s and 1920s but has since become hazy in the mist of musical theater’s past. Rick Benjamin, the conductor for the group as well as the author of the substantial liner notes, posits several reasons for Hirsch’s current obscurity. Hirsch died at a relatively young age, before modern technology could broadcast his music across the modern mass media, including radio and sound film. Benjamin adds that “we are still in the very early days of research into the history of the American musical stage,” suggesting that “a wider study of first generation materials—particularly the scores themselves—reveals that much of tremendous value has been overlooked.” This comment gets to the heart of the matter, which remains that there is an immense amount of fantastic music that sits unplayed and unheard by many who might otherwise adore it, scholar and fan alike. Benjamin does not address the larger problem at hand, which is that almost everything written before Show Boat(1927) has been written out of the musical theater canon by authors who feel that there was a “Golden Age” that should not be haunted by its inept predecessors. This problem affects the huge body of music from the 1880s and beyond that has simply been forgotten, especially from the genre of the revue.

Benjamin and his orchestra have produced a crisp disc of Hirsch’s music. Using a small group of musicians culled mostly from Juilliard, he has made an impressive career of recording music that has slipped through the cracks of most of our musical knowledge. Benjamin created the orchestra after he encountered an extraordinary collection of sheet music in 1985 that included ragtime songs, Broadway theater music, silent film scores, and dance orchestra arrangements. The orchestra since that time has been one of the premiere forces in the reassertion of this repertoire in our musical consciousness. Past recordings include several treasuries of dance music, a wonderful Scott Joplin collection, and, more recently, theater music by Joe Jordan and George M. Cohan. The group has also created the soundtracks to a several early movies that now appear on DVD ( The Mark of Zorroand three Charlie Chaplin films from 1916–17).

Midnight Frolicprovides many recordings of songs that are simply not available anywhere else on compact disc. This is a first-rate recording that Hirsch no doubt would approve of; after all, it spotlights some of the composer’s best songs in a fresh, clean, and sprightly manner that cannot be ignored. Not only are these tracks well performed, but some of them are even the first recordings available. Of the many songs on the album, “Hello, ’Frisco!” from The Ziegfeld Follies of 1915serves as the most memorable. The spirited and lively interaction between two talented vocalists, Colte Julian (baritone) and Bernadette Boerckel (soprano), matches the boldness of the orchestra itself. Their careful attention to diction led to possibly the first time that the words to some of these songs are [End Page 509]entirely clear. The orchestra during the verses of songs appear soft and somewhat transparent, yet clear enough to let the vocal line shine. The orchestra does a fine job of traversing music from “Going Up,” “Mary,” and other tracks; the musicians display their great sense of rhythm, from the precise articulations of the strings to the ever-present percussion.

Benjamin includes a brief list of the recordings that informed his direction for the compact disc, and a comparison between some of these older sources reveals that his ear was well attuned to some of the best qualities of these valuable predecessors. The avid collector of early Broadway music can compare this orchestra’s “The Wedding Glide,” from The Passing Show of 1912, with the same song available on Pearl’s Music from the New York...

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