Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music

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McGLINN, John

(b John Alexander McGlinn III, Bryn Mawr PA; d 14 February 2009 of a suspected heart attack, aged 55). Conductor and archivist of American musical shows. A self-taught pianist, he studied music theory and composition at Northwestern University, graduating in 1976, and moved to New York, where he recorded Songs of New York for Book-of-the-Month Records. He had a special interest in the Princess musicals of Jerome Kern, giddy, innocent confections from 1900-20 that were first mounted at the Princess Theater. He had taken part in a revival of Kern's Show Boat (1927) in Houston, Texas in 1982; it had been revived (and shortened) several times, and McGlinn was trying to restore it when the Secaucus discovery happened, which he compared to opening King Tut's tomb.

In 1982 80 boxes containing 20,000 items of manscript by Kern, George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans and others were discovered in a Warner Brothers warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey: lost songs and original orchestrations of legendary Broadway musicals were among the discoveries. (For more of that story, go here.) McGlinn's next albums were a recording of Gershwin overtures and dance music using the original orchestrations, and another called Kiri Sings Gershwin, with soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, released by EMI in 1987. He went on to record Jerome Kern's Sitting Pretty (1924), and Show Boat. The recordings were definitively complete: Show Boat of course is considered to be the beginning of the modern American musical show; the three-disc album had 3.5 hours of music including songs that had been cut from the show, variants, revival music, film music and more. A single disc of the McGlinn recording was also released, representing the score as it would have been heard on opening night. McGlinn's other studio recordings were albums like Broadway Showstoppers, Kurt Weill on Broadway and a Jerome Kern Treasury, showcasing both obscure and well-known songs from shows, presenting them as originally intended.

McGlinn also helped to restore and/or conducted revivals of the original versions of Vincent Youman's No No Nanette (1925), Cole Porter's Gay Divorce (1932), Gershwin's Anything Goes (1934), Rodgers & Hart's On Your Toes (1936), Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Lerner & Loewe's Brigadoon (1947) and Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate (1948) (the later ones had nothing to do with Secaucus). On some of his recordings, McGlinn did cameos: on Show Boat, he was a pianist at the Trocadero, when Magnolia is auditioning for a job.

McGlinn embarked in 2001 on a project to restore and record the complete works of Jerome Kern and Victor Herbert, with backing from the Packard Humanities Institute, but left after a year, according to the New York Times, seized with the desire to conduct Wagner, another lifelong obsession. At the time of his death his latest project was restoring the original orchestrations and previously lost dance music to the 1954 Broadway version of Peter Pan, for the theatrical publisher Samuel French.