Jazzy Energy and the Jets: Bernstein’s Wide Legacy
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From left, the baritone Thomas Hampson; the soprano Dawn Upshaw; the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas; the cellist Yo-Yo Ma; and Christine Ebersole, the Broadway star, with the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night.
The idea of a major classical music institution opening its season with a gala program, a festive potpourri of the serious and the whimsical with nods to pop and Broadway, usually seems better in conception than it sounds in reality. It’s hard to bring off this kind of populist mix without seeming to pander.
But Michael Tilson Thomas has the breadth, depth and showmanship to do it, as he revealed on Wednesday night, when he conducted the San Francisco Symphony in an all-Leonard Bernstein program to open the 118th season of Carnegie Hall. On paper the gala program raised doubts. Segueing with hardly a break from the ebullient Broadway star Christine Ebersole singing “I Can Cook, Too” from “On the Town” to the cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing the elegiac, intensely somber Meditation No. 1 from “Mass” seemed a risky idea.
But Mr. Thomas knew what he was up to. The program kicked off a citywide festival, “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” to honor the 90th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth. More than any other composer of the 20th century, Bernstein embraced a wide range of traditions: classical music, musical theater, jazz, Latin American dance and more. And Mr. Thomas, a Bernstein protégé, born to a Southern California family that thrived in Yiddish theater, shares his mentor’s multifaceted interests and skills.
Beginning with the Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story” (1961), played complete, Mr. Thomas announced that this was not to be just a feel-good evening. The performance he drew from the San Francisco Symphony, which sounded great on this night, was the freshest, most incisive and respectful account I have heard of this undervalued score.
There was plenty of jazzy energy and swing. But for Mr. Thomas, playing in a jazzy style does not mean loosening up on rhythmic execution. Riffs and rhythms were dispatched with a relaxed incisiveness. In the snappy Prologue and the restless Scherzo sections, the playing was crisp, lean and brassy. Mr. Thomas did not let a drop of sentimentality seep into the string playing for the soaring lyrical lines in “Somewhere.”
He brought out all the intriguing subtleties of this score, for example, the ascending inner voices that crisscross the descending melodic line in the gently insistent Cha-Cha. And in the finale, which reprises the tragic conclusion of “Somewhere,” Mr. Thomas balanced the pungent chords so precisely that this passage seemed as harmonically inventive as anything in Stravinsky.
After this, it was time for some talking. Mr. Thomas is a natural at offering audiences chatty and informative comments on music.
He began by saying that this anniversary festival was no time to try to airbrush Bernstein “into a kind, avuncular Jewish Santa Claus.” He was a “real guy, with real demons and real questions,” striving for “real answers,” Mr. Thomas said. And with a nod to the issues now stirring up in the presidential election, Mr. Thomas added that there were two things Bernstein was very proud to be: “a proud musician” and “a proud liberal.” The comment provoked great applause, if also some uncomfortable seat-shuffling among the patrons at this pricey gala.
Then, with the orchestra playing examples, he took the audience through some specific passages in the work we were about to hear: excerpts from “A Quiet Place,” Bernstein’s 1983 opera.
I keep waiting for a production of “A Quiet Place” to reveal this work as a great overlooked American opera. These excerpts did not provide that epiphany. Still, there are inspired touches in the music that was presented, especially the quietly ominous orchestral prologue and epilogue, rich with quizzical harmonic writing and Mahlerian melodic richness. The baritone Thomas Hampson gave an anguished performance of “You’re Late,” the aria of an irresponsible father, encountering his alienated children at the funeral of their mother. And the soprano Dawn Upshaw was disarming in “Morning, Good Morning,” when the adult daughter in this dysfunctional family sings at her mother’s grave.
After intermission Ms. Ebersole was wonderfully perky in “I Can Cook, Too.” Mr. Ma’s playing of the Meditation No. 1 was so pensive, gripping and elegant that I wished he and the orchestra had performed the entire work, which has three meditations.
Again, the mood shifted suddenly. Ms. Upshaw was charming in “What a Movie,” from the one-act 1951 opera “Trouble in Tahiti,” and Mr. Hampson gave a compelling account of “To What You Said …,” a setting of a Whitman text, from “Songfest,” with Mr. Ma playing the poignant solo cello part magnificently.
There was more. Five Juilliard School students portraying the roughneck Jets did a kinetically choreographed and delightful performance of “Gee, Officer Krupke” from “West Side Story.” The evening ended with “Ya Got Me” from “On the Town.” All of the soloists took part, each singing a verse, including Mr. Thomas, who proved an engaging, breezy and stylish singer. Can you imagine Lorin Maazel singing to his audience at the New York Philharmonic?
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