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Lerner & Loewe: My Fair Lady on SACD

John Wilson comments: My Fair Lady is the quintessential American London musical. There is not a semiquaver or a semi-colon in the wrong place. Steven Wilkie, one of the fiddle players in my orchestra, describes it as The Marriage of Figaro of the twentieth century. And when I asked the great opera conductor Richard Bonynge what the finest post-World War Two operas are, he said, 'My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!... they're the great operas that will live on'. We have recorded every note, including underscoring, plus all the music written but cut before opening, with the instrumentation exactly as it was on opening night. Also, thanks to recent research, we have the restored original orchestrations. The reason I want to record everything the composer, lyricist, book-writer, and orchestrator did is that I believe it is a piece of significance by people who were masters of their art and craft. This was not written in an afternoon; it was chiselled away for months. They were ruthless in excising anything they felt would not make the grade. We have a duty to set down as closely as we can their final thoughts on what they created.