Show Boat is a 221-minute studio album of Jerome Kern's musical, performed by a cast headed by Karla Burns, Jerry Hadley, Bruce Hubbard, Frederica von Stade and Teresa Stratas with the Ambrosian Chorus and the London Sinfonietta under the direction of John McGlinn.

[1] The performing score that John McGlinn constructed for his album is a conflation of Jerome Kern's Washington and New York versions, and more comprehensive than either.

The vocal score of "A pack of cards" was recovered even more serendipitously: the only copy of it known to have survived turned up amongst a sheaf of old sheet music in a second-hand book store in Sacramento, California.

While the estates of Kern and Edna Ferber were enthusiastic about the project, Oscar Hammerstein's son William thought it fundamentally misconceived, believing that the alterations that had been made to the show in its tryout phase had been done with good reason and ought not to be reversed.

[2][failed verification] Edward Seckerson interviewed John McGlinn about the making of the album for a feature article published in Gramophone in November 1988.

[3] Christopher Swann shot extensive footage of the making of the album for a Granada Television documentary, The Show Boat Story, which has become available to view online.

[1] The covers of the LP, cassette and CD versions of the album all use an image adapted from the dust-jacket designed by René Clarke for the first edition of the Edna Ferber novel upon which the musical is based, Show Boat, published by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1926.

"The love duets between [Frederica] von Stade and Jerry Hadley", he wrote, were "quite stunningly beautiful, and Bruce Hubbard's firm, honeyed baritone has absolutely nothing to fear from the inevitable comparisons with Paul Robeson".

[5] In their secondary roles, Karla Burns (as Queenie), David Garrison (as Frank), Robert Nichols (as Cap'n Andy) and Paige O'Hara (as Ellie) were all "superb" too.

Teresa Stratas, while "ravishing" in "Can't help lovin' dat man", occasionally came across as "a shade too self-conscious", and Nancy Kulp brought back memories of Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie.

[5] There was no doubt that the Ambrosian Chorus had relished their "rousing" contributions, and the London Sinfonietta were positively riotous in the jazzy music that Kern wrote for Kim's scene in Act 3.

John McGlinn's use of Robert Russell Bennett's original orchestrations made his recording very different from any previous version of Show Boat.

This was plain from the very first bars of the overture: a tuba sounded "a note of dark foreboding" before a cheery banjo led the way to the orchestra's enthusiastic introduction to "Why do I love you?".

"Mis'ry's comin' aroun'" was just one of several excellent pieces heard on McGlinn's discs that had been excised from the score of Show Boat almost before Kern's ink had had time to dry.

McGlinn had also recorded lengthy passages of underscored dialogue, and it was the magnificence of these, ironically, that laid him open to accusations of an error of judgement.

Despite moments of seriousness such as "Ol' man river", it was concerned less with social history or psychology than with the hackneyed trope of "what show-biz folks are like behind the scenes."

Kern's frequent repetition of his catchiest melodies was an instance of a composer flogging his best tunes to death, not of one engaged in an architecture of Wagnerian leitmotivs.

[6] McGlinn's cast included some outstanding singers, but it was questionable whether a Show Boat starring Frederica von Stade, Jerry Hadley, Teresa Stratas and Bruce Hubbard could seem other than a "very old-fashioned, if inspired operetta".

Kern supplied "endlessly lavish musical innovation", and was one of the few composers to have successfully infused operetta with a contemporary American idiom.

There were enough good things in Show Boat to merit the "care and genuine affection" and "devotion, talent and enthusiasm" with which McGlinn and his colleagues had gone about their work,[6] J.

The disappointment would have been easy to shrug off if the music had sustained its excellence, but then, in the music-hall sequence, Kern's inspiration seemed to wilt in tandem with the album's story-telling.

Like Lamb before him, Steane felt that McGlinn would have been wiser to sacrifice some of his bonus tracks in order to make room for more dialogue.

"[8] Writing about the making of the album in The New York Times on 25 September 1988, Stephen Holden described it as "magnificently recorded and sung" with "vital, intense performances".

"I had never believed that Show Boat could be mentioned in the same breath as Porgy and Bess," he wrote, "yet McGlinn's recording demonstrates how subtly Kern and Hammerstein placed each number in the course of their 180-minute saga.

]; unused - 1927) The Creole love song (Act One, Scene Seven; unused – 1927) Out there in an orchard (Act Two, Scene Four; unused – 1927) Gallivantin' around (Universal film – 1936) I have the room above her (Universal film – 1936) Ah still suits me (Universal film – 1936) Nobody else but me (Act Two, Scene Nine; Revival – 1946) In 1988, Angel Records released the album in the US as a triple LP (catalogue number DSC 49108), triple cassette (catalogue number A2 49108) and triple CD (catalogue number A4 49108).

[5] The CDs were issued in a slipcase with a 136-page booklet containing a synopsis, a libretto, a historical essay by Miles Krueger, notes by John McGlinn, an interview with Florenz Ziegfeld's secretary about the musical's original production, fourteen historical photographs and portraits of von Stade, Hadley, Stratas, Hubbard, Burns, Garrison, O'Hara, Nichols, Kulp, Barton, Dabdoub, Gish and McGlinn.