Word: bernsteins
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...mood and pace were allegro, but the program was strictly "Home Suite Home" for Composer-Conductor Leonard Bernstein, who marked his 65th year last week by returning to his birthplace in Lawrence, Mass. The big day began with a parade through the middle of town in a 1928 antique Ford, and went on to include a stop at the old family home (24 Juniper Street). As passionate about political issues as he is on the podium, Bernstein strongly endorsed the nuclear freeze movement in a speech. But the maestro was irked by Senator Edward Kennedy's failure to show...
Sometimes it is possible to be too talented. Take the case of Leonard Bernstein, for example. The protean golden boy of American music, who will turn 65 in August, has justly won renown as a flamboyant conductor, an engaging proselytizer and an omnidirectional composer. Bernstein has conquered in ballet (Fancy Free), the Broadway musical (West Side Story) and the symphony (The Age of Anxiety). But in the past 20 years, it seems, the vast range of his talent has hindered rather than helped him, especially as a writer of serious music. In 1963 there was the embarrassment of the "Kaddish...
...work, staged by the Houston Grand Opera as part of a triple commission by the Kennedy Center and La Scala, is a two-hour sequel to Bernstein's 1952 Trouble in Tahiti, a one-act gem stone that gently chided the false contentment of the burgeoning new American suburbs, while poignantly focusing on the failing marriage of an archetypal couple, Sam and Dinah. In its fluid, assured handling of styles, its economy of means and its genuine melodic inspiration, Trouble in Tahiti is a small masterpiece...
...Bernstein felt the need to add a cumbersome sequel is a mystery. Does anyone care what happens to Mr. and Mrs. Calaf after the curtain goes down on Turandof? But Bernstein and Librettist Stephen Wadsworth, 30, a former editor of Opera News, have gone ahead to construct a convoluted second chapter that picks up 30 years later, just after Dinah's death in a suicidal, drunken car crash. There are now ten characters instead of two: the couple's son Junior (Baritone Timothy Nolen) and daughter Dede (Soprano Sheri Greenawald, in an outstanding performance); Dede's bisexual...
Still, there is a problem with the music itself. Like some other composers of his generation, Bernstein no longer fully trusts his basically conservative musical convictions. The eclectic A Quiet Place is fundamentally tonal, but its melodies only infrequently blossom, as if Bernstein were inhibited by 30 years of modernism from writing the kind of straightforward, expressive music that obviously agrees with him. Instead, he has compromised with a bloated, percussive score that, stripped of its bluster and its "commitment," is too often little more than a plaintive bleat. Only in the orchestral interludes, affecting, purely musical ruminations that speak...