Stephen Sondheim: Live recording of Phinney's Rainbow found on bookshelf

A rare live recording of one of Stephen Sondheim's earliest musicals has been discovered on a bookshelf in the US city of Milwaukee. 

The American composer and lyricist wrote Phinney's Rainbow when he was an 18-year-old student in 1948.

The celebrated songwriter, who died last year, is best known for West Side Story and Gypsy.

"This is the first original cast recording of a Sondheim show," Paul Salsini told BBC News.

He found the CD while he was cleaning his office.

"I noticed that there was a space between a couple of CDs and I looked at the shelf below and found that this recording had fallen down into the next shelf. It had literally fallen through the cracks."

The show had four performances at Williams College in Massachusetts and someone, possibly even Sondheim himself, recorded it before it was eventually transferred to a CD.

Lasting 1hr 20mins, it is a sizeable score with 19 tracks. Salsini, who's 87, and the author of the memoir Sondheim and Me: Revealing a Musical Genius, says "it's a mystery" where the recording came from.

It's an amateur recording and the sound quality is not great.

Some words are muffled and there is background noise, frequent bursts of laughter and applause, as well as a few glitches and silence.

Nonetheless, the eminent music scholar Stephen Banfield, who wrote Sondheim's Broadway Musicals, said he is "absolutely delighted that it's come to light" and it is significant.

"Any complete recording of a live show from 1948 is pretty important, there aren't many," he said.

"I'm not aware that we have recordings of any of the other shows that Sondheim did when he was a youngster. The importance of it is that it's the earliest Sondheim we're likely to hear. Earliest in both senses of him actually playing one of the two pianos in the performance and also in the fact that it's his own music."

Professor Banfield added: "It's always important to see where an artist came from, what they were aiming for when they were young".

He said he could detect "certain pointers" in some of the tracks towards songs which appear in later Sondheim musicals including Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods. 

Paul Salsini is now donating the CD to the Sondheim Research Collection in Milwaukee to enable the wider public to hear it. 

But he does not think Phinney's Rainbow should be performed again.

"No, no, it's a college musical ... it's a curiosity piece it really is," he said.

"But it's an interesting curiosity piece not only because it was the first for him but because of how it had showed the imagination and tendencies that he would show through the rest of his career."