A.r. Leo

Originally scheduled for release in 1981, the double-album I'm a Rainbow was shelved at the last minute. In the proocess, it became legendary among Donna Summer fanatics. In 1996, I'm a Rainbow was finally released as a single compact disc. Like most of Summer's recordings from the late '70s and early '80s, it was produced by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, who give the stylish disco a sleek, sexy sheen. The difference between I'm a Rainbow and its predecessors – and, indeed, its sequels – is the subject matter. Throughout I'm a Rainbow, Summer turns in some of her most personal, introspective lyrics and singing, which gives the album an emotional force her albums sometimes lacked. In fact, given the quality of the music, it's hard to see why this was shelved at the time because it is stronger than the majority of her official studio albums.

In the course of an astonishing long life, Leo Ornstein (1893 - 2002) had many shifts of fortune. Recognized as a child prodigy on the piano, Ornstein's family fled the Russian pogroms and moved to New York City in 1906. Ornstein studied piano and composition and graduated from what would become the Juilliard School of Music. From 1915 through the mid 1920's, Ornstein was famous as a concert pianist and notorious as a composer of highly dissonant, futurist works of avant-garde music. Coming from a poor Russian Jewish family, Ornstein married a wealthy heiress, Pauline Mallet-Provost. In the 1920s, Ornstein abruptly retired from the concert stage and founded a music school in Philadelphia.