Leonard Bernstein

Last year was 90 since his birth and next year is 20 since his death, and it seems to be time for examination of his legacy, such as in this concert I was sent to review on Saturday. As more of a musical theater song recital than anything else it was a little out of my ordinary line, but I like this kind of music in its traditional vein - more, in truth, than I do classical lieder or opera - so I was happy to be there. The pairing of selections from his stage shows with the song cycle Arias and Barcarolles demonstrated that, though Bernstein's music covers a broad span of emotional character, stylistically and intellectually it's all of a kind. Unlike Vernon Duke or Kurt Weill he didn't have one personality in Carnegie Hall and another around the corner on Broadway.

This must have been part of the reason Bernstein was such a failure in his own eyes as a classical composer. People just couldn't take him seriously, with the flamboyant theatricality and whimsy that kept showing up in his "serious" work. The other reason was the lure of the performing life which, in his later years, meant he could never buckle down to serious composition as much as he felt he should.

I'd like to bring him back and assure him that, in posterity's eyes, he's succeeded on both counts. No, he wasn't prolific, but neither was, say, Berlioz, and they both achieved a good genius share of masterpieces. And the stature of his work has grown as the chasm that high modernists had dug between classical and popular music in his time has begun to be bridged since it. Look at his Mass. Derided by many at the time (1971) as a sloppy, incoherent hodgepodge, it proves in sympathetic hands to have tremendous cumulative power, and is now accepted as a masterpiece of postmodern art, its supposed defects recognized as virtues of (dare I say it) catholicity on a scale that had hardly been invented then.

Too bad there wasn't time, or performing capacity, at the concert to address these issues. Or Bernstein's other legacies, as conductor or educator, which are what mostly reached me during his lifetime. I saw little of the "Young People's Concerts" on TV, but I did have a box set of small-sized records and accompanying book designed to introduce children to classical music, and another LP with his distinctive smoky baritone voice narrating and explaining Carnival of the Animals and The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, my introduction to their composers, Saint-Saëns and Britten. (When I first heard Bernstein say that the "Aquarium" in Carnival was "in the style of Chopin" I had no idea what that meant. What was a show pan?)

Later, when I began collecting classical records for myself, the gorilla label in the field was Columbia, and most of my LPs of the standard orchestral masterpieces, and much other music as well, came from the sweeping surveys recorded by Columbia's three flagship conductors [can you have three flagships? well, they did]: Bernstein with the NYP, Ormandy of Philadelphia, and Szell of Cleveland. They, and Bernstein most of all, taught me music.

P.S. on Bernstein

I couldn't see where to stick it in in my previous post, but I did want to add one word on Bernstein's stage work, and that is regret that the concert found no room for vocal selections from my favorite of his works of that kind, Candide. The pianists played the overture, but it's a standard - which the concert otherwise mostly avoided - and an anomaly at a vocal concert.

Candide was not a success at its original production, but that was mostly the fault of a badly-written script. (Same thing was true of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Like almost everything Alan Lerner wrote after Fritz Loewe retired, it was a complete disaster, but the reviews make clear that it wasn't Bernstein's music to blame.) For years the overture was all you could hear of Candide, but even before Bernstein's death it began to come back in improved revised versions - one of his last projects was a new recording - and if you want to watch the delightful semi-staged "Great Performances" production under Marin Alsop (a Bernstein student and one of his great current champions), with Kristin Chenoweth and Patti LuPone - come on, how could you not? - it's hiding on YouTube in 12 parts, with the first part on direct link here and the others findable in the sidebars.

I wish some of this could have been done at the concert, with more time. True, Cunegonde is a coloratura soprano if there ever was one, and the brassy mezzo we had, Judy Kaye, should on no account attempt "Glitter and Be Gay", but the Old Lady's Song ("I am so easily assimilated") would have been perfect for her (the chorus part would have had to be cut off), and she and baritone William Sharp could have done well with Cunegonde and Candide's marriage song in the first act, perhaps transposed down a bit.