“The CD is splendid.
A job well done.”
– Dwight Blocker Bowers, Cultural Historian,
Smithsonian Museum of
American History
“What discoveries!
The results are
magical.”
– Donald Rosenberg,
Music Critic,
The Plain Dealer
This prestigious collection
features liner notes by
Ted Chapin, executive
director of the Rodgers and
Hammerstein Organization;
William Bolcom, Pulitzer
Prize-winning composer
and pianist; and Albert
Petrak, nationally known
authority on piano rolls.
Made possible by
generous gifts from
The Rodgers &
Hammerstein Organization
and Lainie Hadden.
Recordings
A Unique Collaboration Between Harbinger Records
and The Musical Theater Project!
Richard Rodgers: Command Performance
During the 1920s, when a player piano was a proud feature of every fashionable home, the producers of piano rolls sought out the most celebrated entertainers of the day to preserve their own keyboard artistry on paper.
Those entertainers were Broadway composers, and the rolls they produced were enormously popular not only for the music they contained, but for the seemingly direct connection they afforded listeners to the creative genius of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and other masters.
Seventy years later, Gershwin’s piano rolls would become a top seller in CD form. And now another brilliant musical theater composer is to have his day in the sun.
Harbinger Records and The Musical Theater Project are proud to announce Richard Rodgers: Command Performance, a CD edition of the composer’s historic piano rolls.
AVAILABLE SEPTEMBER 30, 2008 AT AMAZON.COM
