Recordings
Peters has recorded six solo albums and several singles. Three of her albums have been nominated for the Grammy Award. Peters' 1980 single "Gee Whiz" reached the top forty on the U.S. Billboard pop singles charts. She has recorded most of the Broadway and off-Broadway musicals she has appeared in, and four of these cast albums have won Grammy Awards.
Peters' debut album in 1980 (an LP), entitled Bernadette Peters contained 10 songs, including "If You Were The Only Boy", "Gee Whiz", "Heartquake", "Should've Never Let Him Go", "Chico's Girl", "Pearl's a Singer", "Other Lady", "Only Wounded", "I Never Thought I'd Break" and "You'll Never Know". The original cover painting by Alberto Vargas, pictured at left, was one of his last works, created at the age of 84. According to The New York Daily News, Peters "persuaded him to do one last 'Vargas Girls' portrait... She just went to his California retreat, asked him to do one more, he looked at her and said, 'You ARE a Vargas girl!'" She kept the original painting. The original title planned for the album was Decades. Rolling Stone wrote of her debut album:
| “ | Peters debuts on record as a first-rate pop torch singer: Melissa Manchester with soul, Bette Midler on pitch. Her album has already spawned the hit single "Gee Whiz," a laid-back, doo-wop version... that makes Peters' piping, little-girl voice seem almost like a cutesy novelty. There are also a couple of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil rock tunes in which she sounds slightly trashy and out of her depth. The Peter Allen songs on side two are really more her style. In fact, the whole second half of Bernadette Peters is just about perfect, from the star's semi-C&W rendition of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's "Pearl's a Singer" to a wistful recap of Harry Warren and Mark Gordon's romantic "You'll Never Know." But the best cuts are in between. "Other Lady," written by Lesley Gore (!) with Ellen Weston, tackles an age-old problem with... devastating eloquence... and Peters delivers it with the proper brooding introspection. Allen's compositions, "Only Wounded" (co-written with Carole Bayer Sager) and the torchy "I Never Thought I'd Break" (co-written with Dean Pitchford), feature the finest singing on the LP...the unusual absence of airbrushing echo places heavy demands on the chanteuse's sultry soprano. That Bernadette Peters rises to the occasion makes her performance that much more impressive." | ” |
Her next solo album, Now Playing (1981), featured songs by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Carole Bayer Sager and Marvin Hamlisch, and Stephen Sondheim (for example, "Broadway Baby"). Bernadette Peters was re-released on CD in 1992 as Bernadette, with the 1980 Vargas cover art, and included some of the songs from Now Playing. In 1996, she was nominated for a Grammy Award for her best-selling album, I'll Be Your Baby Tonight, which includes popular songs by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Lyle Lovett, Hank Williams, Sam Cooke, and Billy Joel, as well as Broadway classics by Leonard Bernstein and Rodgers and Hammerstein. The live recording of her 1996 Carnegie Hall concert, Sondheim, Etc. - Bernadette Peters Live At Carnegie Hall, also was nominated for a Grammy Award.
Peters' next studio album, in 2002, Bernadette Peters Loves Rodgers and Hammerstein, consisted entirely of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, including two that she often sings in her concerts, "Some Enchanted Evening" and "There Is Nothin' Like a Dame". This album, which reached position 14 on the Billboard "Top Internet Albums" chart, was her third album in a row nominated for a Grammy Award. It formed the basis of her Radio City Music Hall solo concert debut in June 2002. Her last solo album, titled Sondheim Etc., Etc. Live At Carnegie Hall: The Rest of It, was released in 2005. It consists of all of the songs (and patter) from her 1996 Carnegie Hall concert that were not included in the earlier recording.
Additionally, Peters has recorded songs on other albums, such as "Dublin Lady" on John Whelan's Flirting with the Edge (Narada, 1998). On the Mandy Patinkin Dress Casual 1990 album, Patinkin and Peters recorded the songs from Stephen Sondheim's 1966 television play, Evening Primrose. On the tribute album Born to the Breed: A Tribute to Judy Collins Peters sings "Trust Your Heart".
In The New York Times review of the 1986 Broadway cast recording of Song and Dance (titled Bernadette Peters in Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Song & Dance'), Stephen Holden wrote that the recording was "a personal triumph for a singer and actress who is rapidly establishing herself as the first lady of the Broadway musical. Performing material whose music borders on kitsch and whose lyrics and story suggest a verbose soap opera, Miss Peters nevertheless projects an astounding emotional generosity and conviction. Almost singlehandedly she turns the inconsequential erotic misadventures of Emma ... into a touching romantic fable about love and its defenses and the loss of innocence. ... Miss Peters has always oozed a cuddlesome Shirley Temple-like sweetness and vulnerability. This quality, which used to seem more like an adorable child-star affectation than an deep-seated trait, has proved to be an essential ingredient of Miss Peters's personality. A delivery that once seemed coy and cutesy has deepened and ripened into an honesty and compassion that pour out in singing that is childlike but also resilient."
In 2003, Andrew Gans wrote in Playbill.com of Peters' recording sessions for Gypsy: "What is it about her voice that is so moving? Part womanly and part girlish, it is a powerful instrument, not only in volume (though that is impressive) but in the wealth of emotion it is able to convey. ... her voice – that mix of husky, sweet, rounded, vibrato-filled tones – induces a response that spans the emotional scale." Of her "Rose's Turn", Gans wrote: "...her rendition of this song may be the highlight of a career already filled with many highlights: She has taken a song that has been delivered incredibly by others and brought it to a new level." Of her performance on the recording of Follies (2011), Steven Suskin wrote in Playbill.com: "This is a fine Sally, the sort of Sally you'd expect to get from an actress like – well, Bernadette Peters. The performance on the CD is compelling; either this is simply the magic of the recording studio or Peters has changed what she does and how she does it."
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