Lena Horne's Autobiographical one-woman show, The Lady and Her Music, has played to full houses every night since it opened on Broadway last May, and now a live two-record set, produced by Quincy Jones, has captured this extraordinary event in its entirety. Horne, a symbol of black gentility and sexiness in the Forties and Fifties, has turned the conventions of the one-person extravaganza inside out. Instead of a self-glorifying ego trip, her performance is a shared journey of self-discovery about the human cost (to the audience as well as the singer) of being a symbol. Some of her stories are as appalling as they are funny, especially her tales of Hollywood in the Forties, when a special makeup called "Light Egyptian" was created for her and then slapped on Ava Gardner and Hedy Lamarr, white actresses who played black roles that should have been Horne's.

Of the evening's twenty-seven tunes, most of which predate rock & roll, at least a dozen are showstoppers. No one has ever explored Rodgers and Hart's "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" as tellingly as Lena Horne does. After placing it in its dramatic context–"This is a sad song about an old broad with money who falls in love with a young, young stud"–Horne delivers a three-octave tragicomic monologue about a woman who, to her immense joy and anguish, has rediscovered her long-suppressed sexuality.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top," as done by Horne, isn't simply a cute little ditty from Oklahoma! but a prototypical celebration of going mobile – as fresh and exciting as, say, the Eagles' "Take It Easy." The singer elevates the Charles Aznavour-Herbert Kretzmer ballad "Yesterday, When I Was Young," a sudsy lament for one's lost innocence, into a bluesy howl of painful determination. In a stunning change of pace that suddenly launches the number from a French-cabaret setting into an operatic mode, Horne communicates Aznavour and Kretzmer's message – that most of us squander our youth and fail to realize it until it's far too late – with a devastating, almost vengeful, conviction.

In the Forties and Fifties, Lena Horne's aura of aloof sophistication made her the very model of a black nightclub entertainer, yet despite her fine sense of phrasing, her records from that period have nowhere near the soulfulness of those by Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, et al. In recent years, however, Horne has looked into herself and brought forth the anger and hurt pride she kept hidden under the pose, and it's transformed her singing. Proof of this is illustrated by The Lady and Her Music's two versions of the star's signature song, "Stormy Weather," one done Forties style, with polite restraint, and the other with all stops out.

In the depth and range of its emotion, Lena Horne's singing hits peaks of ferocity, tenderness, playfulness and sheer delight that would have seemed unthinkable in her glamour-girl days, while, technically, her voice has lost little of its satin timbre and flexibility. Her performance here is a sustained cry of affirmation, and because that affirmation acknowledges the bitterness, cynicism and toughness of the world, it's exceptionally moving in ways that conventionally optimistic musical celebrations rarely are.

All this from a woman who's a beautiful sixty-four! (RS 357)

STEPHEN HOLDEN