FIGHTING FORM:

Frank Sinatra in New York (WILL FRIEDWALD , 12/29/09, WSJ)

"Sinatra: New York" spans 35 years in the singer's career, beginning with a pair of curiosities that will delight serious Frankophiles: The first item is a three-song 1955 reunion with bandleader and trombonist Tommy Dorsey in which the singer is in great shape, particularly on a beautiful reading of "This Love of Mine" that presages his classic recording on "In the Wee Small Hours" taped two weeks later; here, his affection for his former employer and mentor is clear. The next selection is a 1963 semiprivate performance for employees of the United Nations in which Skitch Henderson is Sinatra's only accompanist. Saddled with Henderson—who had briefly subbed as pianist with Dorsey 20 years earlier but left because, as Henderson told me around 1991, "I couldn't swing a Mack truck, you know"—Sinatra finds it impossible to get a groove going on the fast numbers in the six-song recital.

The centerpiece of the new box is a pair of complete concerts from 1974, his first year back on the road after an 18-month retirement. Sinatra is in marvelous voice on both, but during the April Carnegie Hall show he gets lost in "Come Fly with Me" and "I Get a Kick Out of You," two arrangements he surely knew. The mystery of the Saturday, Oct. 12, 1974, show from Madison Square Garden is why this concert stayed in the can while the following night's show—a lesser performance—was televised as "The Main Event" TV special. ("The Main Event" album was cobbled together from five different concerts, and sounds it.) Sinatra is at his dynamic best throughout the Saturday night set. His attention to detail on "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life" and "Send in the Clowns" makes these renditions substantially more moving than any other performances of those songs, and even "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," which was an embarrassment to Sinatra fans at the time, sounds much better now than it did then.

Sinatra is also in good fighting trim in the 1980 Carnegie concert included on DVD; the early '80s were a particularly strong period for Sinatra. The singer delivers the best songs from his recently released album "Trilogy," including the amazing "Summer Me, Winter Me," an intimate epic that was in his concert book for only a short time.

The last CD includes excerpts from two shows in 1984 and 1990, and his chops were in better shape when he was pushing 75 than I remembered.