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I didn't intend to buy this soundtrack.
A few weeks ago, while tromping through the local Goodwill, I happened upon a two-disc copy of the Original London Cast The Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, complete with full libretto notes. Now, please understand that for a long time the Phantom soundtrack has been my holy grail of Goodwill finds. Always elusive, even in the veritable graveyard of well-loved Broadway soundtracks that is our Goodwill. But, all this time it had actually been the movie soundtrack I'd been hunting (how very blasphemous of me, though.) Now face to face with almost exactly what I sought - but not quite the thing - my eyes involuntarily rolled.
In the past, I'd always taken issue with Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford's performances. Brightman obviously had the vocal chops, but her portrayal seemed to lack the emotional gravitas for Christine to really shine; instead she always came off as just a bit self absorbed. Crawford had the creep-factor that's so dreadfully lacking in most phantoms now, but the wavering lilt and tinny quality of his tone had always been overkill for my taste.
But I bought the discs anyway. The liner notes would at least be worth it.
That afternoon, I plopped disc 1 into our 1980's CD player, turned on the stereo system, shut the door, curled up, and shut my eyes as the disc hissed at me before bursting into life. I gave it a chance, and wow, am I glad I bought this soundtrack. There was just something about blasting the original recording through that stereo system that caused me to step back and truly bask in those glorious sound waves booming into my eardrums. Between the music and the vocals, the story - the whole musical came alive in a way I haven't experienced for a long time.
The instrumentals on these discs were simply amazing. Throughout I kept wondering why I'd never noticed various notes/chords before. Were those even in the other tracks? I don't know if they altered the music in later incarnations or if I was just hearing a level of detail I had never caught before, but it was marvelous. And the cast? I still think Crawford's Phantom had his overdone and underdone moments, Barton's Raoul was a bit stiff and whiny at times, and Brightman was still her trilly self as Christine. But somehow none of that really mattered as it had before. Maybe it's because of how new the musical was at the time; everything about it was just so fresh and exciting.
I often wonder if Lloyd Webber had any inkling of how special Phantom would become over the years, or how many thousands of times it would be performed. But after years of micro-judging every over-acted, over-sung note of every boot-leg performance I could find, all while hunched over my screeching laptop speakers, this original recording was a breath of fresh air to say the least. I loved listening to what it was at the beginning - before there was any set formula for a good Phantom performance and before people started murdering it with bad affectation (not naming names here.) I thoroughly enjoyed it. So glad I didn't pass this one over.
It's nice to go back to the beginning.
1 comment:
This recording is how I first experienced TPOTA -- I was thirteen or so, and taking oil painting lessons. My teacher was a woman in her late sixties, and happily because I'd been fed a steady diet of classic movies and TV shows, she and I actually had stuff to talk about with each other while painting. She also loved musicals and would play soundtracks while we painted -- I remember loving her Broadway version of Fiddler on the Roof because it had songs I didn't know from the movie. Anyway, one day she put this on, and I think my brain may have melted a bit. She happened to have just upgraded from a cassette tape copy to CDs (this was the early '90s), so she graciously gave me her old cassette copies. I took them home and made my mom and brother listen to them, and then all our brains melted a little.
But I didn't know the story at all. I had to figure out from the lyrics what was going on, which mostly worked, except for "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again," which I thought Christine was singing about the Phantom, and which convinced me that she was the drippiest, dopiest chick ever.
Four or five years later, I got my hands on the original book, read it, and discovered that no, duh, she was singing that song to her dead father. Whew.
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