RIP John McGlinn

[Big Magilla]

This is indeed tragic. For all I knew the man was twice as old as his 55 years. Time had passed him by as surely as if he were. Here's his bio/obit from Wilkipedia:

John McGlinn was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and was raised in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. A self-taught pianist, he studied music theory and composition at Northwestern University, graduating in 1976.

His first recording, 1984's "Songs of New York" for the Book of the Month Club was also his first experience as a conductor. He had previously worked for the New York City Opera and planned a book on Jerome Kern. McGlinn's interest in Kern emerged at the same time as a 1970s' revival of interest in authentic American music, including a Scott Joplin revival and Gunther Schuller's ragtime performances. In the early 1980s he joined with the Houston Grand Opera to work on a major revival of Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat, acting as musical editor and restoring the original orchestrations for the production. He also did some work for Ira Gershwin on original orchestrations for several Gershwin projects and worked with orchestrator Hans Spialek on the 1983 Broadway revival of On Your Toes. Following the Book of the Month Club recording, McGlinn performed three Kern musicals in concert at the Carnegie Recital Hall and this success led to a recording contract with EMI-Angel Records. The first recordings were an album of George Gershwin songs with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and a program of Gershwin overtures.

From 1987 to 1992 he made recordings of the complete scores for Show Boat, Anything Goes, Brigadoon, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me, Kate, and an obscure Jerome Kern musical, Sitting Pretty.

The three-disc, three-and-a-half hour Show Boat album, and the one-disc Anything Goes album, have been acclaimed. The New Yorker magazine called McGlinn's Show Boat "the show album of the past" and "a show album for the future. It unites the possibilities of reproduction and reinvestigation." McGlinn unearthed the lost materials for Show Boat in a Secaucus, New Jersey, warehouse in 1982.

In 1992 EMI chose to not renew his contract. During this period he conducted many performances of musicals in concert, including the original 1925 No, No, Nanette (at the Carnegie Recital Hall), and the Kern-Hammerstein show Sunny. He made several radio appearances with the BBC Symphony Orchestra for BBC Radio 3, conducted several concerts in conjunction with the Library of Congress Music Division, guested on an "Evening With The Boston Pops," and recorded two albums of excerpts from Wagner operas for Naxos Records. He also conducted the most recent New York City Opera revivals of Brigadoon and H.M.S. Pinafore.

Another project, begun in early 2001, was to record and edit scholarly editions of Victor Herbert and Jerome Kern, but none of these albums have been released. McGlinn left the project in 2002 and the future of the recordings remains in limbo.

His last project was to restore the original orchestrations and dance music to the 1954 Broadway version of Peter Pan.

McGlinn was found dead in his New York City apartment on February 14, 2009. The cause of death is believed to have been a heart attack. He is survived by two sisters and a brother.

[Penelope]

He passed away a month ago and I just found out. The complete recording of Show Boat is simply astonishing.

John McGlinn, 55, Restorer of Musicals, Is Dead
Source: NYT (2-19-09)

John McGlinn, a conductor and musical historian who delved deep into neglected archives to recreate musicals like “Show Boat,” “Anything Goes” and “No, No, Nanette” in their original form, died on Saturday at home in Manhattan. He was 55.

His brother, Evan, said that no official cause of death had been determined but that he had probably had a heart attack.

Throughout his career, Mr. McGlinn breathed the intoxicating air of the early Broadway musical, with special attention lavished on what are known as the Princess Musicals — giddy, innocent confections devised by Jerome Kern, with assistance from P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, in the first two decades of the 20th century at the Princess Theater.

Working backward through time, he pared away accretions to original scores, returned to original orchestrations, reinstated lost songs and, in concerts and recordings, exposed audiences to the primal versions of musicals that had been roughly treated over the years.

His most ambitious reclamation effort was “Show Boat,” by Kern and Oscar Hammerstein 2d, which he restored to its original length of nearly four hours. Among other changes, he reinstated two songs whose scores had languished for decades in a Warner Brothers warehouse in Secaucus, N.J.