The album (I now have it on a Pearl CD, rounded out by Isaac Stern’s rendition of the Bizet/Waxman Carmen Fantasy) doesn’t tell us a lot more about the show as originally conceived than can already be ascertained from the movie soundtrack. It was dimly recorded on poor wartime shellac, so the fairly full-sounding orchestrations (the arranger was Robert Russell Bennett) and choral numbers (Robert Shaw, choral director) don’t register with much color or force. The crucial Carmen/Joe confrontations of Acts 2 and 3 are not included here, and as in both the movie and the recent CSC production, the final one, in Act 4, cuts to dialogue as soon as the vocal demands start to mount.

Muriel Smith, the Carmen, went on to sing the role in the original opera in several important venues. She lacked the chest register to steady and toughen the low range, but had a lush tone of good mezzo hue, phrased musically, and is by no means at the bottom of my lifetime Carmen parade. As Cindy Lou (Micaëla), Carlotta Franzell, is also capable. She has that little midddle-octave edge I identify as high-functioning musical-comedy soprano, but it releases into a free and fairly full upper fourth. She answers in the affirmative the question of whether or not the B section of the aria was rewritten to accommodate the movie’s Cindy Lou, Olga James. Franzell sings the upward intervals in original pitch, and like James takes the old Singer’s Option high B-flat on the penultimate note nicely.

Luther Saxon manages the lyrical sections of Joe’s music pleasingly, and though one or two awkward phrases make one suspect misadventures in the dramatic episodes, those are absent here. Glen Bryant (Husky Miller) must have been chosen for physical presence and/or acting skills—the Toreador Song (“Stan’ Up and Fight”) is raw-toned.

Factoid and query: La Vern Hutcherson, the Joe of the movie and alternate Porgy of the 1953 stage production of that work, sang Joe onstage in some of the tour and early revival performances. Would he have done so in something like full, legit voice—that of a good baritone with the reach for what remains of the role at score pitch—or would he have used the Harry Belafonte-ish power croon, with touches of full voice at both range extremes, that gets him through the movie? Either way, it’s sure that he and his colleagues sang in large theatres without amplification over a sizable pit orchestra, unlike the CSC cast in their very modest venue.

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NEXT TIME (Oct. 26): La Fanciulla del West rides back into the Met to rescue, yes, Jonas Kaufmann. With reference to a couple of Italian performances from back in the day.