This Sunday November 29, we feature Sigmund Romberg's music on the The Lyric Stage, mostly from The Student Prince, but also from New Moon as well. Romberg will conduct selections from a Student Prince recording from 1951, and we'll also have Dorothy Kirsten, Gordon Macrae, and Mario Lanza singing his music. For an encore, Dorothy Kirsten and Gordon Macrae will each sing a selection from New Moon.
Romberg himself rated his music as below that of his composer friends Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers. He felt he was middlebrow, but did defend his work from the critics with the comment no one liked it except the public. But if he was middlebrow, his music finds a permanent place in the hearts of anyone who has ever heard it, and it is some of the most enduring anyone wrote in the twentieth century.