The prospect of a CD bringing together two of today’s major singers is an enticing one. Much of this recording is a reprise of their BBC Prom last summer with the same conductor, a sold-out occasion. However welcome their programme was then for presenting much new material, it also underlined the paucity of invention in the current musical theatre: these include the songs from Passion, surely the dullest score Sondheim has written, as well as numbers by Kander and Ebb well below their best form. The collective lack of variety in the songs, (partly induced by the CD title ‘Under the Stars’), the over-inflated orchestrations, the navel-gazing torpor of many of the lyrics, induces in the listener a state of ‘not waving but drowning’.

The arrangers must bear some of the responsibility for this, ironing out, for instance, the subtle rhythmic interchange between barcarolle and waltz in ‘Hello, Young Lovers’ into a featureless terrain. And why de-personalise Hammerstein’s lyric? You may recall that this is the song in which Anna, the governess in The King and I, remembers her late husband Tom, not ‘he’ and ‘him’. Many of the more recent songs are built in layers, with one climax following another in a desperate bid for significance. ‘All I ask of you’ is a pleasant exception in that respect but once again the arrangers can’t leave it alone, battering us with yet another reprise of the final bars.

The singers go along with this approach. Fleming throughout this collection tries too hard to inflect meaning into the lyrics, projecting them for more than their worth. Terfel at least gets one break donning his hat as ‘The Music Man’ in ‘Seventy-six trombones’ which he despatches with some flair. There is a mistimed edit on his initial entry on ‘All I ask of you’ which should have been redone. All in all, this is a sorry state of affairs.