I (barely) made it to Carnegie Hall's opening night last night, which also served as the first installment of their massive Bernstein bash to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary year of his birth. (By the way, if you're curious to know what occupied much of my summer, check out the Gramophone special issue that we've put together to coincide with this festival--the issue will be available starting this very evening, including at Carnegie and Avery Fisher halls.)
A gala is a gala, and last night's was complete with goofy audience participation and a couple of brief singing (!) turns by Michael Tilson Thomas,--but the conductor, the San Francisco Symphony, and a roster of special guests that included Dawn Upshaw, Thomas Hampson, and Yo-Yo Ma certainly entertained the usual opening-night crowd. (There weren't any evening dresses that I saw that were worthy of the Fug girls, but I did notice one society lady's befeathered gown had decided to molt right then and there in the Carnegie aisle, leaving a trail of little black feathers in the woman's wake.)
A few snapshots of the music: In the West Side Story variations, the brass section blew as hot as anyone in Machito's band--good on them. So many orchestras, even American ones, are so obviously uncomfortable playing Bernstein.
I was speaking with MTT just a few weeks ago for the Gramophone special issue, and he mentioned to me that a problem in Bernstein's scores is that he assumes that the musicians have a working knowledge of all the idioms he calls upon, and so not everything is necessarily explicitly spelled out on the page. This can lead to a lot of trouble both for classically trained and pop/other musicians who play his music. (We've all heard those performances, right? Especially the ones in which orchestral players are clearly embarrassed and struggling.) Last night's horns sounded just as they should, and the results were brilliant.
I'm sorry to say that Christine Ebersole completely phoned in her solo turn in "I Can Cook, Too," (from On the Town)--the growls on nearly every note came cheap. Not so with Upshaw, who turned "What a Movie" from Trouble in Tahiti into a perfect miniature portrait. Yo-Yo Ma was, well, Yo-Yo Ma, in all his charm and professional graciousness; Thomas Hampson was moving in "To What You Said" from Songfest (hard not to be, in the material he had to work with); and the kids drawn from Juilliard for "Gee, Officer Krupke" were nimble and good-humored, despite their unenviable task of trying to really dance and move on a tiny sliver of the stage, in front of the first violins and MTT's podium.
Comments