CD REVIEWS - Mad About The Boy (NAXOS) and
The Noel Coward Songbook - Ian Bostridge

Alan Farley Writes: I had been intrigued for years, ever since I saw the following entry in Brian Rust’s Complete Entertainment Discography in his list of Noel Coward’s recordings: London, September 20, 1932: OB-4211-1 Mad About the Boy Rejected over the years as I interviewed a number of Coward’s colleagues and associates, I asked about it, but no one had ever located it. Then one day in January 1993, nearing the end of a visit to London, I was going through the contents of one of Joan Hirst’s cabinets when I came across a stack of old 10" and 12" 78’s on the top shelf. I looked through them and found one or two recordings of some of Coward’s music I didn’t have, and noted them. I also found a 10" disc with a white label pasted over the regular label, which bore simply the typed title Mad About the Boy. Could this be the long-lost disc? It would take weeks to find out. I was to leave London the next day, but Joan promised to have the disc transferred to cassette, and let me know. Some weeks later, in a phone conversation, she told me that both she and Graham Payn had listened to the recording, and “we think it is Noel.” She sent me a copy of the cassette with the proviso that it not be revealed that it had been found. After listening to it, it was obvious that it was indeed Noel. Some years later, approaching the Coward Centenary, Graham relaxed the restriction, and I supplied a copy to the BBC’s Arena three-hour Coward special, where it was used to underscore a bit of a scene. Some months afterwards, a remarkable thing happened: I received a call from Eric Bernhoft, partner of the pianist Peter Mintun and a collector of vintage recordings, telling me that he had purchased a miscellaneous lot of 78s at a sale, and among them was a recording of Noel Coward singing Mad About the Boy. I told him about my discovery, and later comparison revealed that the two 78’s were identical recordings. When I became aware of the Naxos CD series Noel Coward - The Complete Recordings I made contact with the producer, David Lennick, who waseager to include the recording in the series. We just missed the deadline for Volume 2, where it would perhaps have fitted best; but it is now the lead item in Volume 3, just released.

Dominic Vlasto writes: An unfortunate footnote to Mad About The Boy’s inclusion in this new Naxos selection is that somehow the liner note states, falsely, that Coward is accompanied by Ray Noble and Orchestra. Ray Noble and Orchestra did indeed work that session with Coward and accompanied four other numbers; but it is obvious that this track only has piano accompaniment. However, the really exciting thing is that this may well be the only publicly-released example we have of Coward accompanying himself at the piano, something he almost never did in public (though I do know of a wartime newsreel film clip which briefly shows him accompanying himself at a hospital concert). One knows Ray Noble’s work as accompanist, of course, from several recordings, and his style is always neat, discreet and pretty polished. The accompaniment for this recording of Mad About The Boy is a bit too waywardly fluid in its harmonic underlay, too sketchy, almost, in places, for it to have been prepared and delivered by a professional orchestrator, bandleader and accompanist of Noble’s thoroughness and general neatness; and I feel that the piano accompaniment is also almost too well-matched with the rhythmic fluidity of Coward’s vocal delivery for it to be anything other than a selfaccompaniment. There is very little to compare it with to be certain that this is Coward the pianist at work on this track, but he certainly possessed the skills to do it, and the very waywardness of the technique (despite its effectiveness) and the liberties that the accompanist takes with the harmonic underlay which the piece is generally given that makes me feel this hunch may have some mileage in it. I’d be interested to hear if any budding Coward musicologist out there has opinions on the matter!

The Noel Coward Songbook - EMI Classics 72435573742 Ian Bostridge accompanied by Jeffrey Tate ... a review by Dominic Vlasto

This is a very interesting CD - the first time since Joan Sutherland in 1966 that a classically-trained concert-music singer has attempted an entire album of Coward songs. Coward could himself be impatient with trained voices and the formality of concert music performances (we all remember his put-down of a performance of some Mozart as ‘piddling on flannel’), and sometimes he had good cause, knowing that in this sort of music the effectiveness of the words is almost always the primary guiding principle rather than the production of beautiful vocal tone.  For someone trained in the production of beautiful vocal tone, Bostridge does not do half badly. He certainly knows his repertoire, and has written intelligently about the melodic subtlety of Coward, knows that Coward’s material is remarkably varied in style, and appreciates that his music ‘stands at the centre of Coward’s art and cannot be ignored as if he were a brilliant playwright who just happened to write a few famous songs.’ Well he knows the perils that lurk for him in exploring this material: ‘The power of context and of performance itself to lift apparently artless material is often lost.’Bostridge doesn’t often lose the power to lift this material from the commonplace, but there are untidy moments. His rhythmic bending, and spoken highlighting of certain words, is not always comfortable (Twentieth Century Blues and Any Little Fish respectively). He is, perhaps unsurprisingly, at his best in really melodic numbers such as World Weary, but sometimes there is a slight misunderstanding of the tempi variations - as in Zigeuner, which he treats as a song of restrained pace and gentle power, where perhaps it needs far more headiness and confused breathlessness. One of the best things about this CD is the range of material included, some of it unusual. It is very good to have new presentations of songs like Parisian Pierrot, World Weary, Mary Make-Believe, If You Could Only Come With Me, The Dream Is Over and Never Again, which do not figure very much in the Coward discography, and some of the betterknown songs such as A Room With a View also include rarely-heard second verse sections. As a general comment, there is sometimes a bit too much of the melody in Jeffrey Tate’s accompaniments, and instances where none at all would have been preferable (when you have melodic songs sung by such a melodist, sometimes the last thing you want is the tune itself being strengthened in the accompaniment - it can be very tricky to co-ordinate melodic movement).His jazz style is a bit lumpy in Twentieth Century Blues, strangely unrhythmic in ParisianPierrot and downright zany in Mad Dogs And Englishmen. As a general rule, in this sort of work the less you are aware of the accompaniment the better, and he does occasionally make himself too noticable! I think that Bostridge, with this CD, just about makes the case for Coward as a supremely gifted songsmith. Perhaps you need the occasional trained singer to come along and try to prove that ‘Coward may not be Schubert, but he’s not a million miles away.’

Contents: *with Sophie Daneman (soprano) Twentieth Century Blues Parisian Pierrot Poor Little Rich Girl World Weary Mary Make-Believe A Room With a View* Dance, Little Lady If You Could Only Come With Me I’ll See You Again* Zigeuner The Dream Is Over Any Little Fish Mad Dogs and Englishmen Let’s Say Goodbye Something To Do With Spring* The Party’s Over Now Never Again Someday I’ll Find You* I Travel Alone