Christian Sinding / The Grand Tour

On this day in classical music: Norwegian composer Christian Sinding was born in Kongsberg in 1856. Sinding studied music in Christiania (now Oslo) and Leipzig. Influenced by Wagner and Liszt, Sinding is best remembered for his collection of short works for piano. Listen to Daniel Sabbah perform Sinding’s “Rustle of Spring.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-StHeHGyakY

On this day in the musical theatre: Jerry Herman’s “The Grand Tour” opened on Broadway in 1979. Tony Award winner Joel Grey headed the cast of this musical based on S. N. Behrman’s play “Jacobowsky and the Colonel.” The story concerns an unlikely pair: Jacobowsky, a Polish-Jewish intellectual who has purchased a car he cannot drive, and Stjerbinsky, an aristocratic, anti-Semitic colonel who knows how to drive but has no car. When the two men meet at a Paris hotel, they agree to join forces in order to escape the approaching Nazis. Together with the Colonel’s girlfriend, Marianne, they experience many adventures while on the road, but trouble ensues when Jacobowsky falls in love with the young girl. Of Herman’s three flop musicals (“Dear World,” “Mack and Mabel” and “The Grand Tour”), it had the shortest run on Broadway with just 61 performances. Listen to Grey perform the stirring “I’ll Be Here Tomorrow.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iiZa0dIoak

Musical musings: “The Grand Tour” is a musical that is often amiable and sometimes more than that. But it is a patchwork, and an incomplete one. Its engaging moments run in different directions, pull different ways, and leave large areas looking decidedly thin. The effect is that of first-rate talents working at their occasional second-best, and having occasional third thoughts about it. Grey is, of course, the center of the evening. Sometimes this is to the good. Under stress, his portrait of a kind of shriveled angel works very well. He opens his eyes very wide and the pupils are like the points of two invisible exclamation points. But it is a performance that frequently crosses over into the self-indulgent. This Jacobowsky is too pleased with his own charm; Grey has things his own way just a bit too often. – Richard Eder in The New York Times

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