So I've Heard

The Leningrad marvel continues. Thursday night’s concert at the Music Center,
the second of four by the visiting Leningrad Philharmonic, once again drew a
capacity crowd and gave it plenty to cheer. Mariss Jansons, the orchestra’s
associate conductor was in charge, remembered here for the Tchaikovsky
Festival concerts he led with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the spring of
1988.
No greater contrast in podium manner exists than between Jansons’ clear,
classic beat and his unassuming stance and the flamboyant demeanor of his
colleague, Yuri Temirkanov that’s the real spelling [F/L] as witnessed at
Wednesday’s concert. Both, however, drew resplendent results, an amazing
display of orchestral discipline, beautifully balanced tone and stunning
control over dynamics.
Jansons’ program, once again, was Prokofiev/Tchaikovsky: a suite of “Romeo
and Juliet” ballet excerpts and the one-movement First Piano Concerto by the
former, and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Dmitri Alexeev was the capable
soloist in the concerto, a strange, vacillating work (robust romanticism one
minute, brittle abrasiveness the next) interesting mostly as the pad from
which a brilliant career would someday be launched. {E/P]
The Tchaikovsky, as you might have guessed, was the evening’s major triumph.
What was there, you had to wonder, that made this performance under Jansons
satisfying in exactly the way last week’s performance here by the Japan
Philharmonic was not? It wasn’t just a matter of nationality; plenty of non-
Russian orchestras do spectacularly well by Tchaikovsky.
No, it had to do with matters of eloquence. Both performances were note-
perfect; both took some fearsome risks with breakneck tempos in the finale.
But the one, the Japanese performance, seemed to stop at putting the notes
across. Under Jansons, and with some stunning solo work from all over his
orchestra — the brooding, stark clarinet tone, the extraordinary playing of
the horns, not only in the famous “Moon Love” solo but elsewhere in their
soft, muted punctuation — you heard long, oratorical lines of thought, a
sense of building relatively simple ideas into grandiose structures. This time
the Tchaikovsky Fifth resounded as a masterpiece; the last time it didn’t: as
simple as that.
Some details were fascinating. The orchestra is seated with the first and
second violins down front on either side, behind to the right and cellos and
basses to the left. Violins down front lend a special brilliance to any
orchestra. Toscanini favored that arrangement; now it is generally out of
favor except for “authentic” early music ensembles. But a lot of
Tchaikovsky’s scoring seems to demand a special kind of interchange, back and
forth across the stage between the two groups of violins, and those effects
were nicely brought out in this week’s performances.
Someday, in a better world, all orchestras will sound like this.

Word has it that the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra of the U.S.S.R. — to
use its full title this once — is some kind of stupendous performing
organization. Word, this once, is right.Its history is splendid enough. Descended from the orchestra of the St.
Petersburg court, the ensemble was anointed the Leningrad State Orchestra in
1917 and amalgamated into the first Soviet concert society in 1921. During
World War II, under the legendary Eugene Mravinsky (who led the orchestra for
50 years, from 1938-1988) the orchestra never missed a concert. Mention any
notable Russian composer past or present, and you’ll find his destiny
inextricably linked to the Leningrad Philharmonic.It now performs under Yuri Temirkhanov, who conducts two of the orchestra’s
four concerts here (including one tonight), and its associate conductor,
Mariss Jansons, who leads the other two (including tomorrow’s). Temirkhhanov,
who led Wednesday’s opening concert here, is a known quantity in this
country, both as a gifted conductor and as something of a podium show-off. He
has appeared at the Hollywood Bowl, and is due back here for two weeks with
the Los Angeles Philharmonic next month. He was high in the running for music
director with the Philadelphia Orchestra, although his present post, as head
of the best orchestra in Eastern Europe — arguably on the entire continent
— is nothing to take lightly.What makes this orchestra so spectacular? Its noble tradition under Mravinsky
was a good starting point, and Temirkhanov has obviously maintained that
level. He has, for example, preserved that tremendous, clean cutting tone in
the brass, which play without the vibrato that, to some extent, afflicts the
tonal purity of some American orchestras. The sound of the massed Leningrad
brass section jabbing its way through the murky texture at the start of
Tchaikovsky’s “Manfred” Symphony is something one doesn’t easily
forget.The entire orchestra, larger in number (112) than most European groups, plays
with a cleanness, a forthrightness, that is different from the mellowness of,
say, the Vienna Philharmonic and not quite as dry as the Berlin. You get the
feeling, rare at the Music Center, that even when the full orchestra is
roistering through something loud and furious, that there is a welcome amount
of air space around their tone.This opening concert under Temirkhanov was superior stuff all the way, from
the opening romp through Prokofiev’s delicious “Lieutenant Kije,” through
the clattering amorphousness of that composer’s Third Piano Concerto, with
Dmitri Alexeev fully up to its virtuosic demands, to the hour-long
“Manfred,” a work that suggests that the words “neglect” and
“undeserved” don’t always go together.Even so, Tchaikovsky’s meanderings came across capitally, with marvelous
lightness in the Mendelssohnian second movement, and some elegant wind
playing all the way through. For the encore Temirkhanov and the orchestra
clowned their way through Schubert’s harmless little F-minor “Moment
Musical,” an unworthy gesture after this most imposing concert.THE FACTS:
What: The Leningrad Philharmonic, presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic When: 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave.
Behind the Scenes: Conductors: Yuri Temirkhanov (Friday) and Mariss Jansons (Saturday)
Tickets: $10-$45; reservations (213) 480-3232; information: (213) 972-7211

Like a powerful and refreshing cleansing agent, the sound of Roger
Norrington’s London Classical Players swept through the Dorothy Chandler
Pavilion at the Music Center on Sunday night. It lit lights in the dark
corners, clearing out the accumulated sludge of years of Strauss and
Sibelius. It cleaned out the ears, as well, of a near-capacity audience, and
left them cheering at the end.
The LCP is one of London’s many groups dedicated to playing bygone music on
the instruments of that music’s own time, and with some attempt at recreating
performance practices of the time. Most groups stick to 18th-century music,
butNorrington has taken his ensemble farther afield. They are currently well
along in an invasion of the 19th century. Their latest record is of Schumann
symphonies.
Sunday’s program represented a recent stage in that invasion. It consisted of
symphonies by Beethoven and Schubert (the Fourth, in each case), Beethoven’s
“Egmont” Overture and a Rossini tidbit (the “Signor Bruschino” Overture)
as encore. Even confined to a single decade (1806-16), there was enough
variety to underscore the strengths and weaknesses of Norrington’s musical
outlook.
Beyond question, he thrives on controversy. Journals here and abroad delight
in huge spreads on the authentic-performance question, and Norrington’s name
invariably turns up as hero and/or villain. And so he did on this occasion.
The Schubert Fourth, the first stirrings of romanticism in the teenage
composer’s orchestral work, was not so much performed as shaken for dear
life. The performance wasted no time on affection; it sped along, ignoring
the specified repeats in the first movement and finale (and then inserting
unspecified repeats in the Minuetto). Sure, the wind solos, played on genuine
wood instruments, were ravishing, and so was the over-all blend of winds,
strings strung with gut not steel, and the authentically brassy brass. The
sound was there, but Schubert was not.
As bad as was the Schubert, so splendid was the Beethoven Fourth, from its
slow, spaced out opening (a vista of distant stars) to its giggling,
breakneck finale. Maybe it was what Beethoven intended, maybe not; we’ll
never know. But it was an exhilarating tracing of the published notes of
Beethoven’s score, and that’s all we can expect from any performance,
authentic or otherwise.
The whole question becomes silly, in any case. Here we had music played by a
Beethoven-sized orchestra (50-or-so players), in a hall ten times larger than
any that Beethoven knew, for an audience with 20th-century tastes and
expectations, and with the inauthentic spectacle of a flamboyant (but
talented) conductor out front. All you can really expect from Norrington, or
his fellow practitioners of the art of musical resuscitation, is a series of
speculative essays on what might certain masterpieces from the past might
have sounded like when new.
The one authentic and indestructible quality in music is beauty. As long as
that survives in the playing of such groups as Roger Norrington’s LCP, other
questions become irrelevant.

In the 27 years since its founding, the Opera Workshop at the California State
University at Northridge has provided valuable training to its young
participants, and substantial entertainment to the folks out front as well.
Its over 100 productions have ranged from repertory works to contemporary
novelties. Its current production of Kirke Mechem’s “Tartuffe,”which runs
through this weekend at the school’s Little Theater, is a distinguished entry
in the latter category.
A resident of the Bay Area, where he has taught at several schools, Mechem
has composed prolifically in many musical forms. First produced at a San
Francisco Opera workshop in 1980, “Tartuffe,” has made the rounds. And why
not? It gives off an aura of high professionalism; it gives its singers a
good workout, and puts up only a mild challenge to its audience. Its text has
been adapted by Mechem himself from Moliere’s sublime satirical comedy, and
he, too, has done a highly professional job.
The opera’s musical ancestors are the sure-fire old masters: Puccini above
all, whose best manner Mechem has carefully absorbed; Strauss (both Johann
and Richard) in a few nice waltz tunes and in some dissonant scampering right
out of “Till Eulenspiegel.” To these borrowings Mechem adds a passing nod
or two: some Wagner (both “Tannhauser” and “The Ring”) as appropriate
underlining to the pretentiousness of the title character, a flicker of the
Beethoven Fifth to illuminate a fateful knocking at a door.
If the resulting agreeable pastiche is somewhat less than memorable in
itself, it at least accords well with Moliere’s delicious comedy, and the
opera — which runs about 2 1/2 hours — does sail. Its acoustic setting at
CSUN, in the 200-seat theater where the sounds from the orchestra pit tended
to overwhelm all else, did the work less than full service, however.
Still, the production, conducted and staged by the workshop’s founder, David
W. Scott, did the work proud; the composer, in attendance on Tuesday night,
looked pleased. Cathy Susan Pyles designed an attractive single set; the
costumes by Teresa Gibson caught the period quite nicely.
And while one hesitates to single out individual performers during their
workshop years, don’t be surprised to see the names of Michelle de Young, a
large-voiced dramatic soprano who sang Mme. Orgon, and Robin Lee Parkin, a
pert, high-stepping soubrette as Dorine, showing up one of these days in the
big time. Jason Daniel was the imposing, menacing Tartuffe; Benito Galindo,
the properly dithering Orgon; Barbro Johansson his sweet if somewhat starchy
daughter Mariane. The next CSUN Opera Workshop is scheduled for mid-March:
“Suor Angelica” and “Gianni Schicchi,” real Puccini this time.
THE FACTS:
What: Kirke Mechem’s “Tartuffe,” presented by the CSUN Opera Workshop.
Where: The Little Theater, School of the Arts, Nordhoff St. and Etiwanda Ave.
in Northridge.
When: 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday.
Behind the Scenes: staged and conducted by David W. Scott, designed by Cathy
Susan Pyles and Teresa Griffin.
Tickets: $5-$10; information: 818 885-3093.
Our rating: * * *

They’re off and running again in Pasadena.Saturday night at the Civic Auditorium, Jorge Mester and his Pasadena Symphony
Orchestra ended their season’s opening concert with a mighty sprint through
Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony — transformed for the occasion from the
music of a composer nostalgic for his homeland to the music of a man
apparently obsessed with having a plane to catch. There were impressive
moments along the way, to be sure; the orchestra managed to remain upright
over most of the hurdles its conductor had chosen to erect. But the feeling
remained that a lot less fuss might have produced a lot more music.
Have no doubts: Mester is an exciting conductor, and better his brand of
podium exuberance than the work of certain of his sleepier colleagues. If he
tends now and then to throw caution to the winds (and to the strings and
brass, as well), he has a good aggregation of musicians to do his bidding,
some of the area’s best studio freelancers. The orchestra plays fast and
slow, loud and soft; there were times, in fact — in the symphony’s famous
Largo — when the conductor had throttled the volume of the orchestra down
below the audible level of the hall’s noisy (and inefficient) air-
conditioning system.
This is Mester’s seventh season in Pasadena, where (judging from Saturday’s
turnout) he is much loved. He has now abandoned his post as music director of
the Aspen Festival, and shuttles between his New York base (as head of the
New Music Orchestral Project) and a new post as head of the Western Australia
Symphony, with Pasadena as a handy stopping-off point. The Australian
connection probably explains the new work on Saturday’s concert, Peter
Sculthorpe’s 17-minute tone poem called “Kakadu,” named after a national
park in the northern end of that continent.
Sculthorpe is Australia’s best-known composer, a master at devising sound
patterns that move easily between primitive percussive effects and a lively,
inventive orchestral language. “Kakadu” is a big, attractive piece, neatly
balanced between some impressive moments of violent instrumental cataclysm
and a lovely quiet middle section built around a sinuous melody for English
horn, (Between the Sculthorpe and the Dvorak, the orchestra’s solo English
hornist, Joel Timm, had a big night for himself.)
Midway came William Walton’s Violin Concerto, a work created for Jascha
Heifetz in 1939 and affording a fair workout where empty virtuosity is the
object, but not otherwise one of the splendid Briton’s better works.
(According to a printed program note — illustrated, by the way, with a photo
not of Walton but of Kurt Weill — the composer himself didn’t like it
much.)Perhaps the famous Heifetz tone made its way successfully through the rather
ponderous orchestration (at least it did on the recording), but the soloist
in Pasadena, Kyoko Takezawa, was less successful. When she could be heard,
she seemed to be responding adequately to the work’s limited fund of
eloquence. Beyond question, however, she and the audience might have been
happier with a different choice.

At New York’s Carnegie Hall last month, Andre Previn had led the Los Angeles
Philharmonic in Steven Stucky’s “Angelus” and William Schuman’s Third
Symphony, and was scheduled to do so again this week at the Music Center.
Later discovering that he needed more time to prepare an upcoming program in
Vienna Previn, with his renowned curious sense of priorities, dropped his Los
Angeles commitment. It was caught by the Philharmonic’s associate conductor
David Alan Miller, to his greater glory.
Half a century separates Schuman’s big, exuberant symphony from Stucky’s
empty little sound-bite, and the paradox of which is the more modern of the
two is too obvious to belabor. Schuman’s symphony lasts just over half an
hour; it is a strong, thoroughly original work with a particularly handsome,
elegiac slow section at the start of the second of its two movements. It’s
intricacies are not all that difficult to untangle; even Carlo Maria Giulini,
whose taste for American music wasn’t profound, conducted it here quite
successfully.
The Stucky, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, has not improved on second hearing: ten minutes of clever
orchestral sound effects purporting to represent different kinds of bells,
harmless music meant to be forgotten five minutes after it’s over. Stucky has
written better music, most of it for smaller performing groups. His message
seems to be, however, that you write for orchestra these days with extreme
caution, that the reaction you solicit from your hearers is “that wasn’t so
bad.”
Many composers today, apparently, harken to that message, writing these
inocuous works for orchestra as if Jesse Helms might show up in the front row
arm-in-arm with the chairman of the orchestra’s board.. Schuman, full of
beans at 30, obviously worked from no such message, which is why his
marvelous symphony, 50 years later, still sounds fresh and inventive.
Both works drew out the best in young Miller, in big, extroverted
performances nicely balanced and outgoing. Indeed, his poised, nicely planned
reading of the Schuman ranks among his finest achievements here.
Viktoria Mullova was the evening’s soloist, the splendid young Russian emigre
whose mission here — at this appearance and the last, two years ago — seems
to take on the hoariest chestnuts in the violin-concerto repertory and make
them sound fresh. Last time it was the Tchaikovsky; this time, the
Sibelius.
Mullova is all musician. She does not bob or weave as she plays, nor flirt.
Barring, at the most, two squeezed notes in the finale, her technique was all
but flawless; even in the amorphous expanses of the Sibelius, she found more
than mere technical challenge.
Starting with the opening solo, which she shaped into a kind of rhapsodic
improvisation over the buzzing and grumbling of the orchestra, she projected
the work as something fresh and vivid. You forgot the actuality of the work
as one of Sibelius’ more tawdry creations, and listened as if to a piece of
real music. The crowd stayed to cheer.

Over the past 40 years more or less, under one or another name, the Monday
Evening Concerts have served to instruct, thrill, irritate, bore and
fascinate audiences of various sizes, with their obsessive programs devoted
mostly to the outer edges of the musical repertory. It is doubtful, however,
whether many events in that series have been any more valuable, or have
drawn a larger and happier crowd, than the latest edition, this past Monday
at the County Museum.
The program was planned as a memorial to the Italian composer Luigi Nono, who
died earlier this year. Only one work by Nono himself was included . Filling
out the long and rewarding list were works by Nono’s teachers, Gian-Francesco
Malipiero and Bruno Maderna, and his colleagues, Luigi Dallapiccola and, as
the one living composer represented, Luciano Berio. Juan Felipe Orrego-
Benavente was the conductor, with a slendid group of local freelancers
including the soprano Dasietta {cq} Kim and the tenor Jonathan Mack.
What the program turned out to be, to its planners’ immense credit, was a
retrospective of a slice of contemporary musical history that has of late
been virtually forgotten. These Italian composers, Malipiero, from an older
generation, perhaps excepted, worked out their distinctive approach to the
twelve-tone style very much in vogue throughout Europe in the first decades
after World War II. They did so, however, on their own, very Italianate,
terms.
From Dallapiccola there came a string of quiet, elegant pieces full of
fearful melodic gambits that somehow combined with the lyrical spirit of
great Italian art of earlier times. The result, as two works on thie program
— the “Little Night Music” for instruments, and the “Four-Part
Divertimento” for soprano — clearly proved, was music of great charm, even
of wit.
If the Dallapiccola works were the highlight, the works of Berio (his
“Sequence” for solo oboe cavorting with a single sustained B on tape, and
his setting of James Joyce’s “Chamber Music”) and the gorgeously intricate
Serenade of Maderna were worthy program companions. Nono himself was
handsomely, if skimpily, represented by his quirky settings of Machado’s
“Songs to Guiomar.”
Of slighter challenge but no less charm were the two Malipiero works, “Four
Antique Songs” and, in its American premiere, the long visionary song “The
Celestial Kingdom.” Where has all this music been? There was a time when the
music of this small group of Italian pioneers figured frequently on concert
program. This program provided a resuscitation long overdue.
The singing, the individual instrumental work, the strong, committed
leadership of Orrego-Benavente: all were on a high level. Chalk it up as an
unquestioned triumph (also long overdue) for these variable but valuable
Monday Evening Concerts.

The spirit of Mischa Schneider hovered smilingly over UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall
on Sunday afternoon. Cellist of the Budapest Quartet of fond memory, teacher
and saintly friend to all chamber-music players, Schneider is now celebrated
in “Music for Mischa,” a moveable chamber-music feast that began its fifth
season on Sunday before a sizable if not capacity crowd.
The series has been organized by two former members of another distinguished,
much-missed quartet, the Sequoia: violinist Miwako Watanabe (who did not
participate in Sunday’s concert) and cellist Robert Martin, who decidedly
did. Together with violinist Barbara Govatos and pianist Cynthia Raim, Martin
performed in an elegant and challenging program of trios, by Haydn, Beethoven
and Dvorak. Govatos, by the way, is a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra,
who flew in to replace the scheduled violinist, Sylvia Rosenberg, recently
injured in a car accident (but currently on the mend).
Trios for piano, violin and cello are a special and cherishable class of
chamber music. They were an extremely popular form of house entertainment
around 1800; Haydn and Beethoven even arranged some of their orchestral works
for trio; as with records in a later age, this was the way you got to hear,
say, a Haydn or Beethoven symphony in your own home.
The Mischa group, however, chose works originally composed for trio: an A-
major Trio by Haydn dating from his last years, and the C-minor Trio from
Beethoven’s Opus 1 — two works actually created in the same year (1793) by
composers of succeeding generations. The contrast was striking: the Haydn,
full of forward-looking harmonic adventures, the Beethoven delightfully
poised between classicism and his own dramatic musical language in its
formative years.
At the end came a seldom-heard Dvorak trio, the F minor, Opus 65: hearty,
robust romanticism, perhaps a bit too crammed with oratorical gesture, but
graced with a most enchanting slow movement. Throughout the afternoon the
playing was skilled, and also colored with a fine sense of fantasy. One thing
that Mischa Schneider always epitomized was the love of whatever he was
doing; that has become the hallmark, as well, of the players’ organization
that honors his name.

Maybe the Glendale Symphony Orchestra isn’t actually in or from Glendale. But
the crowd that made the pilgrimage to the Music Center on Sunday night, to
greet the start of the ensemble’s 67th season, made it quite clear that this
was the orchestra of Glendale.
In actuality, the orchestra is formed from the immense local pool of
freelance players — as are most of the other metropolitan orchestras in the
area (Pasadena, Long Beach, etc.). The concertmaster is the ubiquitous Stuart
Canin, whose presence at his first-violinist’s stand is usually in itself a
guarantee of high-level playing. The Glendale may not offer the most profound
musical programming in these parts. If orchestras were breweries, this one
would classify as Lite, low on calories but well-supplied with froth.
That latter commodity bubbled forth in a work called “Impresiones,”
composed by the evening’s conductor, Lalo Schifrin, for the evening’s
trumpet-wielding soloist, Carl Severinsen, known outside the medical
profession as “Doc.” Considering the circumstances –a work by a well-known
and successful purveyor of film and TV scores (over 100 at last count) for a
well-known talk-show bandleader and all-around entertainer — it should come
as no surprise that “Impresiones” is not exactly a challenging latter-day
masterpiece.
It is, as expected, a nicely-crafted, harmless half-hour, claiming
inspiration from a Garcia Lorca poem, but more obviously inspired by
television travel ads. Travel where? Severinsen himself provided a hint, with
an encore rendition of some slick variations on the old Spanish pop tune
“Granada.”The audience responded with the familiar standing ovation, a
practice which has obviously made the journey from Los Angeles to Glendale.
The concert began with part of Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”
Overture — minus, for some curious reason, its soft, luscious ending. It
ended with Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” in the Ravel
orchestration. Aside from a startling number of boo-boos (horns in the
Mendelssohn, winds in the Mussorgsky) the performances were brisk and
noncommital. Nobody seemed to care.

I”VE MADE A FEW QUICK CHANGES HERE AS A ROUGH UPDATE. Nobody with any sense of history could have taken Leonard Bernstein’s retirement announcement of last Tuesday at face value. He had, after all, made the announcement before: casting off one facet of his multifaceted talent in
order to devote more time to another. Sure, anyone who had seen him close up
in the past few years — picked out his small, stooped figure, that is, in
the middle of a dense cloud of cigarette smoke — knew that he had to be in
poor health these days; anyone who has seen him at any distance knew the
energy he poured into his conducting. IKt still seemed, lasty Tuesday, as if the time for obituary writing was a long way off. It wasn’t.
He was never the retiring type. In 1969
he “retired” as music director of the New York Philharmonic, which he had led for the past dozen years. A year or so later, back on the on that orchestra’s podium as guest conductor, he turned to the audience in one of his frequent folksy speeches, and all but asked for his old job back. His big compositional projects that he had left the orchestra to pursue — an opera based on Thornton Wilder’s “Skin of Our Teeth” and another on a play by Bert Brecht — had fizzled. So, in fact, did most of his p[rojects after the early sensational success of “West Side Story.” A string of failures had to have left him embittered, and he desperately struggled to regain his own past glory. “This is my orchestra,” he told the audience that night, “and, somehow, I’m going to come back.”
But Bernstein had a way of making any orchestra his own: the Boston Symphony,
which was virtually his practice band in the early years under Serge
Koussevitzky’s watchful tutelage, at Boston’s Symphony Hall and, most of all,
at Tanglewood; later the New York Philharmonic, the Israel, the Vienna. Who
else, besides this writer, cherishes vivid memories of this arrogant young
genius striding the Tanglewood grounds in, say, 1946, flamboyant in his red
turtleneck and sandals in a time when wearing such apparel constituted a
statement of rebellion, especially in the poresence of the aloof, sartorially
impeccable Koussevitzky. ?[ E/P]
Who else remembers the music he made in those early days: the Mahler Second
with the Boston Symphony when there were not yet the present 20 available
recordings, when the work ranked as an exotic item? Or Britten’s “Peter
Grimes,” whose American premiere he led that summer with mostly student
forces and with the composer at hand, beaming approval?
Bernstein had already, by the time of those early Tanglewood performances,
become the most important conductor of his generation; that famous sudden
debut with the New York Philharmonic, at a nationwide broadcast concert, had
occurred three years earlier — on November 14, 1943. That concert — which
you can still hear, on an LP of the radio broadcast issued by the New York
Philharmonic and available for a donation to the orchestra — wasn’t just
your basic Hollywood yarn of the understudy triumphantly taking over from the
star. It stood, far more, for the explosive enabling force that made it
possible for a young man, an American trained in his own land, and even
bearing the burden of a generic Jewish name (which Koussevitzky, in a widely-
circulated anecdote, had once urged him to change) to earn credibility on a
symphonic podium.
And so it wasn’t just the success of that last-minute substitution (for the
ailing Bruno Walter) that turned the 25-year-old Bernstein into the pivotal
figure in the annals of American musical performance. More, it was the fact
that it all happened in the glare of national publicity, in the depths of
wartime gloom when the country desperately needed this kind of good
news.
And this made the Bernstein accession even more crucial: his approachability.
When he started becoming a familiar podium on American podiums, he charmed
the daylights (and the donations) out of his audiences by turning around and
chatting with them about the music. The statesman-conductors of his time —
Koussevitzky, Toscanini, Walter — walked through the world as serene,
unapproachable demigods who received their messages direct from Beethoven and
Tchaikovsky, never from the common herd. Not Bernstein. “Call me Lenny,” he
said on our first meeting. Try to imagine Toscanini’s “call me Artie.”
Bernstein, who drove fast cars and showed up in nightclubs and delivered
friendly chats to his audiences — and who, when the medium was ready for
him, betook his knowledge and his pizzazz to the television studios —
signaled a new breed of conductor. He was the enabling force behind any new
podium master who dared to dream of achieving fame before the customary
debutant’s age of 50 and beyond. Michael Tilson Thomas, Simon Rattle, Esa-
Pekka Salonen, Zubin Mehta? They’re all here because Lenny got here
first.
None of this would matter much except for one thing: Bernstein was as good as
his early hypesters said he was, perhaps more. He had that mix of talents
that few of his predecessors — Leopold Stokowski maybe but who else? —
possessed: phenomenal talent as a conductor matched by his abilities to sell
his art. He drew the casual concertgoer by his talks, and by his podium
acrobatics that would have driven any ballet dancer to despair. But behind
all this was the mind of an extraordinary creative musician, a spellbinding
evangelist fiercely dedicated to the music he believed in.
Plenty of conductors before his time, for example, had argued the case for
Mahler, but it took Bernstein to turn that composer’s tortured flamboyance
into show-biz. He did this (for Mahler, for Ives, for a certain, highly
selective segment of the contemporary repertory) not merely by playing lots
of their music, but by organizing Mahler Cycles, Ives Cycles, New-Music
Festivals: neat, sexy packages that looked good in newspaper publicity. Some
conductors are skilled at playing the house; Bernstein played the world.
He made himself at home in a large part of that world. London’s critics
looked upon him initially with the jaundiced eye they reserve for all
colonials. (Get hold of some copies of The Gramophone in the 1950s. if you’re
looking for textbook illustrations of chauvinism.) Later the Brits came to
shower him with the sort of praise they usually reserve for their own queen.
He has conquered Vienna, which seems implausible, since his own way of
conducting some of the Viennese classics (the feverish Brahms, the sluggish
“Rosenkavalier” and the distorted “Fidelio”) goes somewhat against that
city’s tradition. Has the Austrian reverence for Bernstein become part of its
expiation as the birthplace of Adolf Hitler? “Na ja.” say the wily Viennese
when asked — the equivalent of a shrug and a knowing wink.
But the art of Bernstein needs no such rationalization. There are those, this
writer among them, who prefer other ways of conducting much of Bernstein’s
classic repertory. There are also those who deplore the fact that, as a
ground-breaking, dazzling product of a young musical society, he didn’t use
more of his skills to perform, or at least to plead the case, for other young
composers of progressive tendencies. He played the contemporary establishment
(Copland, Schuman and, of course, himself) brilliantly; other, more
adventurous souls, however, could have used his help.
The records endure, however, to attest Bernstein’s enormous breadth of
musical interest. Curiously, however, they don’t capture as much of the
personal magnetism of Bernstein’s live performances as you’d think. That bond
that he forged between everyone in that hall, and that dynamic bundle of
himself on the podium, is a quality that no recording microphone has learned
to capture.
You had to have been there.