Dmitri Kabalevsky / The King and I

On this day in classical music: Dmitri Kabalesvky’s opera “Colas Breugnon” was given its premiere in Leningrad in 1938. Set in Burgundy, France around the turn of the 17th century, “Colas Breugnon” tells the story of a sculptor who recalls his experiences at the end of his life. While the opera has largely fallen out of the operatic repertoire, its sparkling overture has remained a popular staple of the concert hall. Listen to Andrew Litton and the New England Conservatory Philharmonia perform the overture to Kabalevsky’s “Colas Breugnon.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIcWCOZKfjE

On this day in the musical theatre: An acclaimed revival of “The King and I” closed on Broadway in 1998 after a two-year run. Starring Lou Diamond Phillips as the impervious King of Siam and Donna Murphy as Anna Leonowens, a British woman hired to teach the King’s children English, this revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic was nominated for eight Tony Awards and won four, including one for Murphy and another for best revival. Watch Murphy and Phillips perform the charming “Shall We Dance” at the 1996 Tony Awards broadcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shVIZAev5L8

Musical musings: Taking the story of Anna Leonowens, the adventurous yet very Victorian English governess who tamed the exotic King of Siam, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein 2d created a musical play as joyously all-American as anything they ever wrote. It’s beside the point that “The King and I” is set in the Far East and has nothing to do with America. As expressed by its charming score, the show’s spirit is that of an idealized 19th-century America far removed from the Civil War, robber barons, the Industrial Revolution and the winning of the West through the expropriation of other people’s property. Anna may be English and no more historically accurate than Robin Hood’s Maid Marian. Yet she has the fortitude and wit of those legendary frontier women who drove covered wagons across the wilderness, bewitched and outwitted the heathens en route, then found gold mines in California backyards. “The King and I” is romantic, clear-eyed and highly moral. Though ever- optimistic, it doesn’t deny intimations of darkness; it successfully absorbs them. “The King and I” is probably the most critic-proof of all Rodgers and Hammerstein shows. When it first arrived here in 1951 with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner, the musical play had an imposing heritage to live up to, following as it did “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel” and “South Pacific.” Reviewers were polite but discreetly pained. As much as they hated to say it, or so they seemed to write, “The King and I” didn’t quite measure up. They were correct when they pointed out that Hammerstein’s book, adapted from Margaret Landon’s novel, “Anna and the King of Siam,” was sweet though lacking a strong narrative. But they were dead wrong when they took a similarly dim view of the music, which is packed with riches that give definition to the show’s backbone. – Vincent Canby in The New York Times

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