Bernstein
David Nice
It’s a wonderful thing to hear a nine-piece Broadway-style band at full pelt, and to see real show dancing – the first time for me, in both cases, since early 2020. Wonderful, too, is this sassiest of 1950s musicals, for which those great lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green deserve almost as much credit as Bernstein for his incomparable melodies – all of them winners, melded into a musical whole which keeps the interest through the picaresque adventures of two girls from Ohio in and around New York’s Greenwich Village.Let’s get the big hitch over with first: you can’t hear enough of the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a clever decision to pair Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement with Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. The first is all about happily-ever-after, while the second is all about what happens next. The optimistic grime and smog of 1950s London gives way to the shrink-wrapped brightness and professional happiness of the suburban American dream, smiles freeze into toothpaste-commercial grins and love curdles into quiet domestic despair.A Dinner Engagement wrestles its happy ending to the ground by sheer persistence and determination. The parents are poor, the dinner is burnt, the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mendelssohn: Symphonies 1-5, Overtures, A Midsummer Night’s Dream London Symphony Orchestra/Sir John Eliot Gardiner (LSO Live)That Mendelssohn wrote five symphonies is widely known, though I'd wager that 99% of listeners only know 40% of them. Begin with the rarely-played Symphony No. 1, written when Mendelssohn was 14. Though his precocity is engaging rather than irritating; this is an impressive symphony on its own terms, and not purely because it was written by someone barely out of short trousers. The third movement sounds a little familiar, and then you discover that it's a Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
When the biggest laugh in Bernstein’s Candide goes to a narrator’s mention of how nationalism was sweeping through Europe, you may have a problem. Still, the Bernstein Centenary has been among the best of all possible anniversary celebrations this year and at the LSO Candide - the great man’s bonkers operetta-ish take on Voltaire, a flawed masterpiece with a succession of glorious tunes and snappy lyrics - could have been its apex. At times, it was.If it wasn’t wholly up there, that is in large part due to the conundrum the piece poses about how to bring it convincingly to the stage (or here Read more ...
joe.muggs
If there's anyone on this godforsaken planet who is fully entitled to emote their way through a mash-up of “Imagine” and “What a Wonderful World”, it's Barbra Streisand, right? This, after all, is the woman who was able to deliver “Life on Mars” as a Vegas showstopper, complete with the pronunciation “from Eye-beetser to the Norfolk Broads” and make it into a thing of wonder. This is the woman who has personified camp sincerity for decades, for whom no orchestra is too big, and no crescendo too grandiose. She is, quite often, beyond good and evil, musically speaking.One thing that is just Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: The Complete Naxos Recordings Marin Alsop (conductor) (Naxos)One of the best reasons for investing in this superb Bernstein box set lasts less than two minutes and isn't even by Lennie. Turn to Disc 7 and John Corigliano’s contribution to A Bernstein Birthday Bouquet, eight 70th birthday variations on On The Town’s “New York, New York” from composers with personal connections to Bernstein. Corigliano mixes Copland with Sinatra, to brilliantly witty effect. You hope that the dedicatee was amused. Luciano Berio's opener is a treat, and there's plenty of fun to be had in Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
There must be something of a beauty parade going on in Liverpool now that Vasily Petrenko has called time on his tenure at Philharmonic Hall. After all, someone will need to step into his shoes from 2021 after he departs for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It was refreshing, therefore, to welcome Anu Tali to conduct the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, making her debut with the orchestra. She’s conducted extensively in the USA and in Asia and in many parts of Europe, especially Germany, Scandanavia and her native Estonia. But her appearances in the UK are few and far between. That’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: Wonderful Town Danielle de Niese, Alysha Umphress, Nathan Gunn, London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle (LSO Live)Wonderful Town’s one problem is that it isn't On the Town or West Side Story. If you didn’t already know those scores, you'd consider it a belter, a brilliant sequence of very witty, tuneful songs. That the words are great isn't a surprise, Bernstein teaming up again with Betty Comden and Adolf Green, the trio holed up in a cramped New York apartment in 1953 and finishing the piece in around five weeks. Based on a popular 1940 play, Wonderful Town follows two Read more ...
David Nice
Crazy days are here again – many of us are lucky not to have been born when the last collectve insanity blitzed the world – and nothing in Shostakovich seems too outlandish for reality. On the other hand, there's a growing movement to liberate his symphonic arguments from rhetoric and context. It has a point in proving that these mighty structures, even when they seem as chaotic as that of the gargantuan Fourth Symphony, stand by themselves without necessary reference to the times in which they were composed. But in a performance like last night's from Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Read more ...
David Benedict
“What drivel! What nonsense! What escapist Techicolor twaddle!” No, not a description of Wallis Giunta’s scintillating BBC Proms at Cadogan Hall recital, it’s a lyric from “What A Movie”, Leonard Bernstein’s outstanding stand-alone number from his one-act opera Trouble In Tahiti. Narrating the story of a ridiculously torrid movie the heroine has sat through, Giunta joyously inhabited its every moment and delivered it with complete theatrical assurance. That’s only to be expected; theartsdesk reviewed her stunning performance in the role for Opera North last year. What really impressed here Read more ...
David Kettle
The Edinburgh International Festival scored quite a coup in securing the services of Bernstein protégée Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on the very day of the great composer/conductor’s centenary – and for the festival’s penultimate concert of 2018. And with local legend Nicola Benedetti as violin soloist, there was an understandably expectant, almost carnival atmosphere in the packed Usher Hall. What we got, however, was a concert that was far more restrained – at times puzzlingly so – but more thoughtful, too.The most fun of the evening came in the form of four miniature Read more ...
David Nice
1944 was one hell of a year for Bernstein the composer, with a perfect ballet and a near-perfect musical sharing a general theme of three sailors loose in New York, but nothing else, in their boisterous originality. Perhaps their only equal among Bernstein's works - more contestably – is MASS of 1971, surely his biggest and most resonant score, but hardly a candidate for comparable classicism. What John Wilson applied last night to make On the Town work as unremittingly well as the much shorter ballet, Fancy Free, was precisely that classical focus, high on energy and cutting no slack. Never Read more ...