Out this month from Masterworks is an oddity, which is well worth picking up. Normally known for their recordings of Broadway and off Broadway shows, this moth sees the release of what is really a collection of vignettes, About archy and mehitabel , echoes of archy and Carnival of the Animals.

archy and mehitabel: A Back Alley Opera (27 min, 15 sec) grew out of a fiction created by Don Marquis, (1878-1937) who under the pressure to create a daily newspaper column came up with the idea of archy (nearly always written in lower case form, after all a cockroach can’t reach both the shift key and a letter at the same time), a cockroach, who would nightly use his old typewriter to comment on the state of humanity, lay down the odd poem, but mostly to talk about his best friend, a raggity old female cat called mehitabel. As such, the original 1954 recording can be viewed as one of the earliest concept albums. More information about archy can be found at www.donmarquis.com/archy.

The connection to Broadway is that in 1957 the story was expanded into the musical Shinbone Alley, which starred Eartha Kitt. Mel Brooks also created an animated film, which failed to capture the audiences imagination. The original recording is notable for having Carol Channing, playing mehitabel, supported by Eddie Bracken (archy), and David Wayne. There are no individual songs as such, apart for the narrator, nearly all of the speech is sung.

The first part tells of mehitabel, a past her sell by date moggie, who limps and whose skin is lumpy, but archy is enamoured of her. Having introduced the main characters archy’s heart is broken when mehitabel runs off with a big black tom cat, only to return later with a litter of kittens. Never the natural mother, mehitabel is happy to have them all drown in a trash can, leaving archy to save them. With mehitabel’s return, things get back to normal.

Echoes of archy (17 min, 44 sec) opens with the narrator explaining that archy has disappeared, though mehitabel remains. Although this is essentially a mehitabel story, archy is kept in the story through his writings.

The third piece on the recording is the excellent, though unrelated, The Carnival of Animals (26 min, 42 sec) by the French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), narrated by Noel Coward (1899-1973). The fourteen part musical vignettes cover fourteen animals, starting with the lion. Its combination of music and wit makes the piece similar to Peter and the Wolf in popularity.

However its influence does not stop there, Aquarium, especially, has turned up in such diverse places as Disney films and it was even used as the introduction to Kylie Minogue's 2011 Aphrodite World Tour.

All three pieces have been criminally ignored, even though as individual sections you will recognise much of The Carnival of Animals, so it’s good to see the recording made available again, in the usual Masterworks crystal clear quality.

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Charles Packer