Dinah Sings and Previn Plays

While maintaining her status as a television star, Dinah Shore made a series of classy albums for Capitol Records between 1959 and 1962. On this, the fourth of her five LPs for the label, she again teamed with André Previn, who had arranged and conducted her earlier album, Somebody Loves Me. This time, Previn took to the piano, joined only by an occasional rhythm section for another set of ballads (or, as the sleeve note put it, "songs in a mid-night mood"). They included standards by the Gershwins, Rodgers & Hart and others, and Shore handled them with more than her usual warmth; she smoldered. The result was a concept album that ranks with some of Frank Sinatra's. Maybe sales were negligible because the Shore of this album was hard to reconcile with the grinning hostess on TV, but it probably had more to do with the overexposure TV gives any regular performer, causing the public to look for her on the small screen rather than on the record shelves. In any case, that made this album a lost gem.