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
Andre 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 notes 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
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. [A 2006 reissue added four bonus tracks that were recorded at the same sessions that produced the originals.] ~ William Ruhlmann