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Plus Pro Arte and a memorial for John Daverio
BY DAVID WEININGER
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This year, the Lawrence-born Leonard Bernstein would have celebrated his 85th birthday, and it was 30 years ago this month that he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard that would be filmed and published as The Unanswered Question. Although New York turned out to be his principal destination, his contribution to Boston’s musical culture was immense. If Lenny’s birthday seems little remarked on, though, perhaps that’s due to the sense that by now there’s little left to learn about him. The salient characteristics of his conducting and composing are well known, and there’s ample recorded evidence of his successes and disappointments in both spheres. The Sony Legacy label, however, has decided to commemorate the occasion with two three-disc sets, each titled Leonard Bernstein: A Total Embrace, and each packaged in the style of last year’s Glenn Gould reissue, A State of Wonder. Unlike the Gould set — which centered on his two recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations — these compilations are thrown together from bits and pieces of Bernstein’s recorded legacy with Columbia, Sony’s older (and more adventurous) incarnation. The set devoted to Bernstein the composer fares better, as it includes enough material from his theater and concert output to give you a decent idea of how Lenny worked in each field. The linked selections from On the Town, West Side Story, and Candide demonstrate how perfectly Bernstein was suited to Broadway: no other composer of musicals could lay claim to his boundless reserves of rhythmic energy and orchestral color. And Sony was wise enough to include in full his first recording of the Chichester Psalms, perhaps his greatest "serious" work. The collection devoted to his conducting, however, is deeply unsatisfying. Most of its contents are single movements torn from complete works; taken together, they offer no coherent picture of his musicianship. Hearing Bernstein conduct the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony may tell you that he could conduct slow music beautifully, but it tells you next to nothing about what he did with (and to) Mahler’s music. And one finale of a Haydn symphony doesn’t testify to how revolutionary his strong, bracing Haydn conducting was. There’s evidence of good musicmaking here — Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Ives’s The Unanswered Question — but nothing new or well chosen enough to throw fresh light on his musicianship. The one time the compilers hit on something new, it turns out to be no more than a tease. There’s a brief excerpt from a performance of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex recorded as part of the Norton Lectures. From the six minutes included here, it sounds like a gem, full of passion, energy, and character. To get hold of it in toto, though, you’d have to shell out for the entire Unanswered Question DVD set, since the Oedipus recording never made it to CD (though it did appear on LP). Unless contractual issues with the Bernstein estate make the complete recording unavailable, the folks at Sony would have directed their efforts more fruitfully toward bringing this curiosity to wider notice. About three years ago, Sony Classical began reissuing all of Bernstein’s Columbia recordings in the Bernstein Century series, and we got to hear some similarly long-buried treasures that hadn’t previously been available on CD. Like most worthwhile projects under major labels, this one now seems to have been abandoned. Had Sony truly wanted to honor this great musician’s heritage, it would have announced the resumption of the Century project and made available again such essential items as his recordings of Haydn, Sibelius, and Shostakovich symphonies; that would have been interesting. As it is, Bernstein seems to have become the latest casualty of over-re-release. A Total Embrace proves to be far less than total, and not much to embrace, either. SPEAKING OF BIRTHDAYS: the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra celebrates its 25th anniversary next Sunday with a reprise of its first concert in 1978 — Dvorák’s Serenade for Winds, Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, and the suite from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Isaiah Jackson conducts the October 26 3 p.m. concert at Sanders Theatre, and tickets are $9 to $45; call (617) 661-7067. On a far more somber note, Boston University suffered a huge emotional blow back in March when musicologist John Daverio went missing for a period of weeks. His body was later discovered in the Charles River without further explanation. Daverio was universally respected as a scholar and universally liked as a human being, and his mysterious death has torn a hole in the university’s music community that will take some time to heal. He’ll be remembered at a memorial concert featuring many of his friends and colleagues and including the music of Robert Schumann, to which he dedicated so much of his life. That’s at BU’s Tsai Performance Center at 8 p.m. next Thursday, October 23, and it’s free; call (617) 353-8725.
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