"The 'West Side Story' mantle is being shed quite effectively," Litton said. He can move you in a heartbeat of music, and the next minute make you laugh or dance - he's an absolute genius at that."Ĭould it be that Bernstein's time as a composer has finally come? That the blurring of musical boundaries in the new millennium has made his work fashionable and relevant? With so much music available at the flick of a touch screen, listeners regularly make the kind of genre-hopping connections that came so naturally to Bernstein. "I think it's one of his great masterpieces. Litton singled out the second, "The Age of Anxiety," for special mention. In addition to music flecked with jazz, pop and gospel, Bernstein also wrote three symphonies. One of Litton's favorites is "Dybbuk," a little known ballet from 1974 that sounds dissonant and progressive, with a less popular feel than Bernstein's other works. "As much as he loved to borrow musical ideas, much like his hero Gustav Mahler did, Bernstein was a genius at making them his own." Litton said he doesn't buy that criticism. Naysayers often dismissed Bernstein as a composer of other people's music. Also on the program is "Chichester Psalms," a choral work from 1965 that melds pop music with passages of symphonic intensity. That includes the ballet "Fancy Free," a brilliantly sassy jazz-classical fusion from 1944. Litton will conduct two of his favorite Bernstein pieces with the Minnesota Orchestra in June. "It's great that I'm being asked to do things I wouldn't normally be asked to do," said conductor Andrew Litton, a Bernstein enthusiast who grew up watching the New York Philharmonic's legendary Young People's Concerts. But orchestras also are taking chances on lesser known Bernstein works. Yes, there are abundant performances of "West Side Story" in the works, including one by the Minnesota Orchestra this week and another at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis this summer. With the 100th anniversary of Bernstein's birth this year, there are signs that the tide is finally turning. Fewer still showed any inclination to take Bernstein's composition work seriously. The show remains a slam-dunk commercial success for any theater staging it.įew midcentury music lovers knew much about Bernstein's other Broadway musicals, let alone his ballets, symphonies, sacred choral works and pieces for piano. Songs such as "Maria," "Somewhere" and "Tonight" became American pop classics, with their melding of seductive Latino melodies and edgy jazz rhythms. To some extent, he was dubbed a one-hit wonder following the musical's 1957 Broadway premiere. "I am only going to be remembered as the man who wrote 'West Side Story.' " "You know what's made me really distraught?" Bernsteain complained toward the end of his composing life. This was typical of the opposition Bernstein faced during his composing career.Īlthough Bernstein cut a famously ebullient, self-confident public figure, the insults clearly hurt him in private. "Melodic distinction" and "concentration of thought" were missing, Thomson added. "Bernstein does not compose with either originality or much skill," wrote composer Virgil Thomson from his bully pulpit as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. A part-time composer who hogged the spotlight as the New York Philharmonic's flamboyant conductor. A musical magpie who filched other people's ideas. As a composer, critics argued, Leonard Bernstein was a dabbler.
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