Music For Two People Alone - George Melachrino

 

Lover

Music For Two People Alone

The Melachrino Orchestra

Conducted by George Melachrino

RCA Victor LPM 1027

1954

From the back cover: Two people alone - alone together - the nicest paradox in the English language.

The words to these ten songs are not sung because two people alone together don't need them. They have their own, spoken or silent.

This is the kind of music that hearts becoming one.

It's relaxed, happy music – the kind that George Melachrino's orchestra plays better than any other in the world today.

Actually, Liebestraum once had lyrics. But when it was finally published in its most celebrated version over a century ago – 1850 to be exact – it was wordless. And it has been so ever since. Like all the great love songs, it doesn't need any text to make its point.

With the exception of the perennial Liebestraum, the oldest tune you'll find here is probably Blue Room, which was introduced on Broadway in the 1926 musical that helped to make Rodgers and Hart the biggest names in show business – The Girl Friend.

It was only a year later when Show Boat made its appearance. The Hammerstein-Kern score was studded with hits, among them the ever-popular Why Do I Love You? (Purists will be interested to learn that a song of almost precisely the same title – lacking only the question mark – had been heard in Gershwin's My Fair Lady two years before.)

Gershwin's Girl Crazy was big news along the White Way in 1930. The show itself is long since forgotten, but even those who never heard of it know the unforgettable Embraceable You. By 1931 Tin Pan Alley was beginning to dip into the vast untapped reservoir of Latin American songs. One of the first imports was Quiéreme Mucho – we have known it all these years as Yours. The composer, Gonzalo Roig, is renowned in the southern latitudes for his operetta, Cecilia Valdes, but even in that work he touched no more responsive chords than he does in this lovely ballad.

Rodgers and Hart were so busy writing musicals by 1933 that they didn't have much time for non-theatrical numbers. But they did take a breather in this year to compose Lover, and it turned out to be one of their most successful songs.

How many remember a movie called Kill That Story, circa 1934? Lew Pollack wrote a song for it that survived, and deserved to, after its vehicle was dead and buried. He titled it Two Cigarettes in the Dark.

In 1938 there was another song along the same lines that was not written for a film although it made its way into at least one. This is Hoagy Carmichael's immortal Two Sleepy People, which may very well be the most nearly perfect music ever composed for two people alone together.

But whenever people are alone together it is of no great importance to set a mood for them with atmospheric prose. That takes care of itself. Music, at best, can be merely an added touch.

And that is all this unique album is intended to be – something to make a nice hour of being alone together just a little bit nicer.

You Were Meant For Me

Yours

Why Do I Love You

Liebestraum

Lover

Embraceable You

Blue Room

Two Cigarettes In The Dark

Two Sleepy People

I Love Thee