On the Town is a 74-minute live album of Leonard Bernstein's musical, performed by Tyne Daly, Meriel Dickinson, David Garrison, Thomas Hampson, Cleo Laine, Evelyn Lear, Marie McLaughlin, Kurt Ollmann, Samuel Ramey, Frederica von Stade, London Voices and the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas.

The album includes three numbers that were dropped from the musical before its première in 1944: "Gabey's comin'", "Ain't got no tears left" (a song that Bernstein later adapted into the "Masque" of his Symphony No.

A comedy about the romantic adventures of three World War Two sailors enjoying twenty-four hours of shore leave in the Big Apple, it explored the way in which transience brought people both sorrows and joys.

In the Barbican Hall, she had "knocked 'em in the aisles with her huggable personality", but listeners to the album would notice limitations of her vocal technique that would have been less obvious to people distracted from them by her acting.

Samuel Ramey sang "gloriously" in "I feel like I'm not out of bed yet", a dock-worker's hymn to the dawn, and was "very funny indeed" in his second role as von Stade's stupendously tedious boyfriend.

And "you haven't lived till you've heard Adolph Green's Rajah Bimmy sounding a little as though some middle-eastern voodoo chant has been processed through a ring modulator.

The London Symphony Orchestra, by contrast, were entirely at home in Bernstein's territory, sounding less like a classical ensemble than a Broadway band in which "every last player [was] a character, an individual".

Maurice Murphy's trumpet was "superb", John Harle played a "soaring, throaty sax" and "moody" clarinet music reminded one of paintings by Edward Hopper.

One could see the soloists in close focus, and watch Michael Tilson Thomas "in action like a reincarnate Bernstein, coaxing, cajoling [and] intoxicating" his colleagues.

"Linking scenes, underlining musical numbers [and] lending visual impact", these montages of black and white or sepia footage showed the city "at play, ... at war, ... [by] day and night - zany, poetic, showbizzy, evocative".

From the other side of the musical divide, Cleo Laine was a night-club singer and Tyne Daly, "the quintessential (if somewhat breathless) belting Broadway babe", played the central role of Hildy, the "predatory" taxi driver.

But somehow Tilson Thomas's eclectic assembly of talents together made up "an idiomatic ensemble that's perfectly at home with those crafty Bernstein rhythms and vocal lines and that works together seamlessly".

[1] Deutsche Grammophon also issued a 115-minute film edited from the same two semi-staged concerts at which the album was recorded, including intercut footage of New York City in the 1940s as well as an encore, dialogue and interlinking narration by Comden and Green that were omitted from the CD.