Contemporary music
Albums
Bernstein : 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Slava!, Mambo...
Marin Alsop
Symphonic Music - Released October 12, 2018 | Naxos
Bernstein : Fancy Free, Anniversaries, Overtures...
Marin Alsop
Symphonic Music - Released October 12, 2018 | Naxos
Bernstein : Wonderful Town
Sir Simon Rattle
Musical Theatre - Released September 7, 2018 | LSO Live
Fancy Free - Dybbuk
Mel Ulrich
Classical - Released November 21, 2006 | Naxos
The Nashville Symphony has won considerable acclaim for its recordings of American orchestral music. This is unsurprising, in a sense, for musicians in the group by virtue of their location in a popular-music capital, have been immersed in vernacular American music for a long time -- and so much American classical music is nourished by popular roots. This is true for few composers more than for Leonard Bernstein, and the Nashville musicians do well with an intriguing Bernstein ballet program here. There are plenty of other recordings to choose from in the case of Fancy Free, an exuberant youthful work drenched in jazz and blues, but defining harmonic realms that do not belong to either one. Pianist Steve Kummer does not quite do justice to the sharp jazz accents of the score, but a plus here is the relaxed performance of the original Bernstein popular song "Big Stuff" at the beginning of the ballet (Bernstein specifies that it should be sounding from a jukebox as the curtain goes up). Vocalist Abby Burke evokes Billie Holiday, who later recorded the song. The real feature of interest on the disc is Bernstein's 1974 ballet Dybbuk, which is harder to find than Fancy Free. The work is based on a famous Yiddish-language play by Russian Jewish writer S. Ansky (Shloyme Zanvel Rappoport), who closely studied the folklore of the Eastern European Jews among whom he had grown up. The story seems tailor-made for ballet; it concerns a young man and woman who are engaged to be married, but their plans are frustrated when the girl's father betrothes her to a wealthier suitor. Her original intended invokes the help of the spirit world. This causes his death, but also enables him to become a spirit, a dybbuk, that possesses the young woman on her wedding day. Bernstein places heavy emphasis on occult elements, associated with the Kabbalah branch of Jewish mystical thought, that actually have only a moderate role in the original play. His score effectively infuses traditional Jewish materials into the atonal procedures mandated by the cultural commissars of the time, even if some of the music associated with the rabbinical attempt to exorcise the dybbuk could have been used in another exorcism drama of that period. With the renewed interest in Kabbalah, in Ansky (a fascinating figure whose activities included Schindler-like attempts to rescue some of the perhaps 200,000 Jews who died during World War I), and in Bernstein's eclectic procedures, the time is ripe for a reevaluation of this work, which was panned at its first appearance. The Nashville Symphony under Andrew Mogrelia makes the best possible case for the music. The same cannot be said for the Naxos booklet, which instead of describing the action that accompanies each number subjects the reader to a pointless blow-by-blow summary of the music. © TiVo
Symphonie n° 3 - Chichester Psalms
Gerard Schwarz
Symphonic Music - Released September 1, 2005 | Milken Family Foundation
Symphonie n° 1 / Concerto pour orchestre
Helen Medlyn
Classical - Released January 5, 2004 | Naxos
Leonard Bernstein : Chichester Psalms - On the Town - On the Waterfront
Marin Alsop
Symphonic Music - Released September 9, 2003 | Naxos
Symphonie n° 2 - Danses de West Side Story - Ouverture de Candide
Florida Philharmonic Orchestra
Classical - Released January 1, 2002 | Naxos
West Side Story
Marianne Cooke
Classical - Released October 22, 2002 | Naxos
This delightful and revelatory recording accomplishes something that composer Leonard Bernstein attempted and failed to achieve more than a decade earlier. West Side Story has its operatic moments, enough that Bernstein in the 1980s did a recording with major operatic singers in the roles -- the problem was that those same singers were all significantly too old for the roles they were singing, so it came off as the "geezer" version of West Side Story, albeit technically beautiful. The late Kenneth Schermerhorn and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra have now fulfilled what Bernstein set out to do, and one better -- going back to his original score, before adaptations were made for the needs of the Broadway stage and pit (or the Hollywood orchestra, in the case of the movie), they've brought the piece back to its first completed state. And, with Betsi Morrison, Mike Eldred, Mariane Cook, Michael San Giovanni, and Robert Dean -- who are at least within a few years of the ages of their respective characters, and sing their roles with a bracing, infectiously youthful verve -- they've presented the most exciting rendition of West Side Story heard on record in many-a-year. What's more, it's beautifully played and recorded virtually to perfection, so much so that its one real flaw is a cold, near-sterility that's always a risk with a studio cast and recording on a piece like this -- but that brush with imperfection aside, at Naxos Records' usual budget price, this CD could be, note for note, one of the biggest bargains going, and it might be the best way to discover the music, short of seeing an actual performance on-stage. © TiVo