Apart from West Side Story, which was his masterpiece, most of Leonard Bernstein’s music was mediocre and often pretentious - not unlike his qualities as a conductor. Whether the RSNO manages to galvanise his sprawling Kaddish Symphony at the Usher Hall on Sunday remains to be seen. In his recording of it, he failed to do so himself. But ever since he first appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, conducting one of the French orchestras in the 1940s and standing on what looked like a table, he often seemed too big for his boots.
When he reappeared in Edinburgh in Peter Diamand’s period as director, he was accompanied from the Waverley Station by bagpipes but was unfortunately marched to the wrong hotel. Though his two performances of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony were impressive, his subsequent appearance conducting his own Chichester Psalms, for which he demanded to replace the Edinburgh Festival Chorus with a choir of his own choice, was not. Nor did his decision to add Ravel’s Bolero as an encore directly after La Valse seem anything more than an extravagant mistake
But that was Bernstein - the superb musical educator who in Vienna transformed Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathetique into a sixty-minute trudge, who notoriously distorted Elgar’s Enigma Variations almost out of recognition, who could make Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony the most tedious of experiences and announced to the audience, before conducting the same composer’s quiet and haunting Symphony No 14 that listeners would find it sleep-inducing (I’m glad it was Carlo Maria Giulini who conducted it in Edinburgh).
Bernstein performances were examples of brilliant conductorial miming. But if you closed your eyes to them, what did you hear? Rather less, I would say, than you saw. Some heard this and some heard that. If you were lucky, or receptive, you got the full Bernstein thrill. If not, not. I must admit that I was not always lucky.
As for the Kaddish Symphony, if you are going to hear the RSNO perform it, let me wish you luck. He obviously will not be there to conduct it. But whether that is to the work’s benefit all we can do is hope for the best.
21 August 2014
Your views are nicely summed up by the late great Lauren Bacall in a serenade she sang to Bernstein on the occasion of his 70th birthday. It centres on the fact that Lenny could never make up his mind about and during his career. Glorious lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and lovely little musical quips during verses.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRB-HP9rPGQ