A Bit of Patinkin
I came upon this totally by accident, looking for a video of Tom Paxton’s “My Favorite Spring” and scrolling through YouTube brought up other songs with “Spring” in their titles. And one was a superb rendition by Mandy Patinkin of “Younger Than Springtime” for a 1986 “all star” concert recording of South Pacific with the London Symphony Orchestra. It wasn’t just that his performance of the song was so wonderful, but also watching his efforts performing it were so notable.
But as I was set to use that video here, I noticed another video of the same performance but extended. It comes from a TV documentary on the making of the album. And the interview that Patinkin gives about his nervousness for such things and the additional preparation we see are fascinating and add much depth. A couple of things to point out: first, when we first see him singing with the orchestra, those are not for the recording, but rehearsals. The official performance is done later in the video, standing at the back of the orchestra in a sound-proof booth. And second, the conductor here is Jonathan Tunick, the long-time music director for Stephen Sondheim, with whom Patinkin worked often, so clearly he (Tunick) and Patinkin know how to best work with one another.
By the way, Patinkin clearly has a long career performing live on Broadway, and also doing his one-man solo act (which I saw him perform at the Ravinia Music Festival, where he was utterly ingratiating interacting with the audience – at one point leaving the stage and running to open a side door where he went outside to sign a number to the overflow crowd on the lawn), so that wouldn’t seem to be a source of his nerves. From what he says here, it seems like that mostly comes (for whatever reason) from these “concert productions.”
There are subtitles on this video – I don’t know the language, but they appear to be Swedish or Dutch – and they’re a bit distracting, but eventually easy enough to ignore.
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