City of Angels: Vocal Score

Rating:
Summary: The Complete City of Angels
Review: The full score to the popular darkly synical but comic musical, "City of Angels", is a very useful score for any true fan of great musicals. All the songs are in there original keys compared to the vocal selections book where some of the songs (example: Funny) are in lower keys. This was extremely irritating to me so I had to get the full score. It also contains all the diologue which helps one understand the backround to each song. Overall, it is an extremely worth while buy for anyone who wants an accurate version of the musical. Good Stuff!

Rating:
Summary: The Complete City of Angels
Review: The full score to the popular darkly synical but comic musical, "City of Angels", is a very useful score for any true fan of great musicals. All the songs are in there original keys compared to the vocal selections book where some of the songs (example: Funny) are in lower keys. This was extremely irritating to me so I had to get the full score. It also contains all the diologue which helps one understand the backround to each song. Overall, it is an extremely worth while buy for anyone who wants an accurate version of the musical. Good Stuff!

Rating:
Summary: Terrific score, unplayable reduction
Review: This is one of the great scores of late 20th century musical theatre, with one of the all time great orchestrations, worthy of Nelson Riddle at his best. It is also indisputably one of the smartest sets of lyrics in recent musical theatre memory, with a consistently high standard of humor and poetry. Unfortunately, the vocal score is reduced in a very unpianistic way, which makes it almost totally useless as a performing edition. In a score which is so oriented to the big-band and jazz tradition, there are almost no chord symbols to help the pianist along, which leaves the pianist to the exact voicings indicated in the score. That might be fine, if it weren't for the fact that many of the voicings are really impractical. In several places, it would be physically impossible to play all the notes, and the reduction doesn't make some of the notes smaller to indicate what is essential to the playing. Other times, when the reduction does indicate with smaller notes which parts are unessential, the performance of the notes left over are really unreasonable. For example, on page 71, in the song 'The Buddy System', in measures 54 through 56, the right hand plays the trombone part, a single e held all three bars, while the left hand plays quarter notes that hop up and down four octaves at 152 beats per minute. For the benefit of holding what is essentially a left hand 'thumb-line' for a full 8 beats with the same finger, we lose the sense of where the phrase goes on the piano with two clef changes and the passage, which is really rather simple musically, becomes so confusing and hard to read as to warrant significant practice or rewriting to accomplish it in performance. The accidentals are all musically accurate throughout the piece, but chord symbols would help any working pianist play the fast swing sections much more accurately and idiomatically. This is admittedly an extremely complicated score, with a lot of nuances, but the reduction makes it unnecessarily one of the most difficult scores in the world to play, I would say even more difficult than Candide, West Side Story or Night Music, which aren't walks in the park. And for a pianist who is actually going to play and help a singer along, the brainpower required to muddle through the score will make it impossible to really listen to the singer properly. Get it for the songs in the right key, but if you plan on playing it, give yourself a LOT of prep time.