Dansker lecture features opera star, cantor
By ALAN SMASON
For the seventh time, George Dansker, an opera enthusiast and Broadway musical expert, presented a lecture on one of the major Jewish composers of popular and theatre music, this past Friday, January 20 at Touro Synagogue.
Opera soprano Sarah Jane McMahon sings Richard Rodgers music at Touro Synagogue on Jan. 20, 2017. (Photo by Alan Smason)
Dansker corrects himself and admits that he has actually done nine lectures. “Two of them were on opera and Russian and Yiddish music,” he says “so this is the seventh Broadway Jewish composer.”
Dansker admits that Richard Rodgers, his choice for the lecture, took some time in coming, primarily because he was the least Jewish in his connectivity to religion and practice. “He had the least amount of Jewish life,” he concedes. Rodgers, who wrote with Lorenz Hart early in his career, achieved his greatest success with Oscar Hammerstein II, beginning in 1943 with Oklahoma.
In addition to the lecture titled “All the Sounds of the Earth Are Like Music,” Dansker invited Cantor David Mintz to take part in the program. He sang three pieces. The first was the opening song to Oklahoma, “Oh What A Beautiful Morning.” He followed up with a previously unheard of rendition of “Soliloquy” from Carousel in which two pages of material cut from the original were restored. Dankser had secured that rare piece with the help of Rodger Grodsky, the music director from Summer Lyric at Tulane University and a member of the faculty at the University of Cinncinati Musical Theatre department.
Mintz also closed the program by playing “Edelweiss,” fittingly the very last song on the program and the last song Rodgers wrote with Hammerstein, his most successful partner.
The lion’s share of the program, however, was recited by opera star Sarah Jane McMahon, a Loyola University graduate, who became a protégé of Placido Domingo several years ago and has appeared on opera stages around the world for the last decade.
She performed selections from Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, Allegro, Me and Juliet and Flower Drum Song. McMahon closed her portion of the program with the immortal “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music.
Dansker boasts that this was McMahon’s fifth outing with him which included his lectures on Kurt Weill, George and Ira Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.
“Actually I would like to get Bernstein again because it’s his centenary year,” he muses.
