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Some clever person with too much time on his or her hands once compiled a list of ten books they'd chose to take with them to a desert isle. Ah, to sit on a desert isle with enough time on your hands to read! The modern counterpart would be a list of ten CDs; gee, which Sondheim musicals do you pick? Stephen Sondheim, as you might have heard, is having a birthday one of these days (March 22, to be exact). His 80th. Number 70 was celebrated with an exclusive fete thrown by the Music Division of the Library of Congress, which is where that list of "Songs I Wish I'd Written (At Least in Part)" came from. Number 75 had a gala at the New Amsterdam on 42nd Street and a 12-hour "Wall to Wall" concert at Symphony Space. For 80, there are three competing gala benefits spread over the next weeks — at the New York Philharmonic (March 15), the Roundabout (March 22) and City Center (April 26). It will be interesting to see which Sondheim stars appear and reappear, and who sings what how many times. I suppose someone has already gotten the jump on Sondheim's 85th, in 2015, so make your plans now.

My erstwhile editors, meanwhile, suggested that I take the opportunity to discuss Sondheim on CD. An exhaustive discussion of such would be — well, exhausting, because there is an endless array of material out there. Instead, we shall do a brief overview. Brief, in this case, looks like it will take about three columns. Ten CDs to take with you on a desert isle? How do you whittle Sondheim down to ten CDs? And don't you want to make room for at least something by other composers? Carousel, or She Loves Me? (Did someone say Mame?) Oh, well. We could restrict ourselves to ten Sondheim CDs, which would simplify matters; but even then, we would have to cut off Sunday in the Park to save The Frogs, or vice versa. So instead, I think I'd just take my iPhone, which already has most all the Sondheim CDs fit to hear. (It currently lists 2812 songs, although it seems odd to count the 29-minute fourth movement of Mahler's Sixth — i.e., "a piece of Mahler" — as one song.) So I'll take 'em all, and hope that my desert isle has a wall socket I can plug into. And Wi-fi. I never said a deserted desert isle; some place civilized, where you don't have to go out in the sun. Which makes all this moot, but allows us to tie up the intro and get to the discussion at hand.

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One point needs first to be made. You have original cast albums, foreign cast albums, revival albums and studio casts. I could indeed go through and say that this one, or that one, is the very best of the lot; but that would mean diligently assembling and listening to each and every album, multiple times. Which I have not, and will not, do. Is the original Broadway cast album always going to be the best recording of a score? No, of course not; but in my experience, I most usually go back to the original. Here you have the show as performed when it was fresh and new and the creators — not just the composer but the rest of them — were standing in the back of the theatre (and often sitting in the control room of the recording studio). The performers were singing the songs the way the composer and/or director intended, at least within reason. (Some stars have been known to sing the songs the way they want to, maybe winning Tony Awards in the process.) But for the most part, you are getting what the composer intended.

The singers have, by the time of the recording, been performing these songs for weeks; the arrangements were sometimes molded to their voice ranges and talents. What's more, songs added to the show during the tryouts and previews were often written specifically for that actor to sing in that role at that moment. Sondheim has been known to write songs — important songs — late in the game; these often suit the original performer especially well. And that's who you hear on the original Broadway cast album.

And then there's the band; once again, these were for the most part the same musicians who were playing the show nightly as it geared up for the Broadway opening. This was especially the case with the all-important reed section, where one musician might be assigned to play four or six or seven instruments in the course of the performance. If you know who your people are and what they do best, you will write to their talents — and assume that replacements will be able to play the same parts as well. (Here's a little secret: Broadway's top orchestrators often know their personnel before they write the charts. Having gone through numerous full scores, I can attest that Russell Bennett and Hans Spialek sometimes wrote on the parts not "Reed 1" and "Reed 2" but "Denti," "Peper," "Dale" — these being long-forgotten clarinet/flute/sax players who originated various classic musicals.) Further stacking the deck in favor of the original Broadway cast album is the practice of sweetening the band for the recording. Fabled record producers like Goddard Lieberson and Jay David Saks often talked their bosses into hiring extra players — usually strings — for the recording sessions of important musicals. So that the music on the cast album actually sounds richer and better than it did in the theatre, with the original orchestrators preparing the additional parts. None of this happens for foreign cast albums, revival albums, studio casts and the like. These later albums might well have better voices, or stars you want to hear, or other attributes; but the original Broadway cast album is — well, the original Broadway cast album.

So much for beginners. We can now move to the first show on our list, West Side Story (1957). Some serious Sondheimites discount this one, along with Gypsy, because Sondheim did not write the music. Nonsense; these are Sondheim shows as much as the others. Certainly if the lyrics for West Side were by someone like Sheldon Harnick or Lee Adams, nobody would say — well, that's not really a Harnick show. The lyrics are by Sondheim; so, inevitably, are many of the choices made by the collaborators as they worked their way through. West Side Story is such a classic that there isn't much to say about it, and the original cast album seems to be the way the score is supposed to sound. The composer made his own recording of the show in 1985; Bernstein had every right to cast it to his taste and change tempos at will, but I personally find it hard to listen to. The original 1957 album has a pair of lovers (Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence) who might not be the finest performers ever to sing the songs, but no matter. Chita Rivera, the Anita of the occasion, is unparalleled; the ensemble — especially the Jet boys — is lean and hungry and perfect; and the band matches the cast in electric excitement. Favorite moments: The Prologue, a prime example of a number that might well work better without its lyric ("how long does it take, to reach the moon-a-rooney?"); but the absent lyrics clearly were key to creation of the music. "The Jet Song," which was also extensively reworked. The yearning expressed in "Something's Coming," especially in the bridge ("around the corner, or whistling down the river"). The various sections of Bernstein's "Dance at the Gym." The two numbers that establish and cement the romance, "Maria" and "Tonight." "Cool," with pent-up excitement growing into that central fugue. The amazing Quintet — written as a quintet, but usually performed with the ensemble enhancing the principals. The Ballet, incorporating "Somewhere" and the nightmare. And Anita and Maria's dueling solos, "A Boy Like That" and "I Have a Love."

As an aside, let us mention that the original cast album is discussed in detail — along with various stages of the creation of the show — in the new book, "Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story" by Nigel Simeone. Published by the U.K. firm Ashgate, the book includes a full copy of the 1998 remastering of the original Broadway cast album, complete with liner note booklet. We come across so many "new" books about old musicals which seem to recycle what we've already read. This one tells us things we didn't know, which makes for fascinating reading.