Seckerson's Choice: Bernstein - The Conductor
There were few more powerful presences in the concert hall than Leonard Bernstein. Even on a less than inspirational night the magic would descend. There were the “Lennyisms” - the highly-charged physicality, the sometimes wayward phrasings and tempi - but few lived “in the moment” of the music than he did. He once said - and how revealing this is - that he gauged the success or otherwise of a performance by the degree to which he felt as though he was composing the piece himself as he conducted it.
Read more…That, of course, was especially true of Mahler with whom he had an extraordinary kinship. Their lives were not dissimilar - superstar conductors who lived to compose - and there was that deep-rooted Jewish theatricality and sense of musical irony. Bernstein almost single-handedly brought Mahler to a new and sizeable audience during the 1960s. His live New York performances and CBS recordings made a huge impression. When his recorded cycle was launched with the Third Symphony, the great Deryck Cooke opened his review in ‘Gramophone’ Magazine with the words: “This is the first time I have heard Bernstein conduct Mahler and I do hope it won’t be the last.”
That CBS/Sony recording of the Third remains pretty peerless in my view. The great last movement ‘Adagio’ - sensationally slow - has never been equalled. Likewise his matchless performance of the Fifth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic in his DG cycle of the symphonies. If you take just the monster scherzo and look closely at how Mahler and Bernstein are one in every last score detail you realise just how deep that kinship goes. The expansiveness and keen characterisation of this central movement is so mindful of Mahler’s prediction that conductors would always take it too fast. Not Bernstein.
Then there is the harrowing Sixth which sounds positively cosmic in the tragic finale - thrilling beyond measure - and his Decca recording (again with the Vienna Philharmonic) of ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau making the greatest possible case for a baritone voice in the pantheistic final song “Der Abschied” with moment upon moment that is utterly heartbreaking. This was my final choice in BBC Radio 3’s CD Review “Building a Library”.
No “essential Bernstein” list would be complete without the “big three” American Symphonies of Copland, Harris and William Schuman. It’s amazing how music can paint the landscape of a country and how each of these pieces with their open harmonies, edgy rhythms and craggy proportions typify the great outdoors of the land of the free.
To those we must add the symphony in which the father of American music, Charles Ives, came of age - his Second Symphony in Bernstein’s earlier Sony version. Too bad Bernstein never recorded his masterpiece, the Fourth Symphony.
20th Century symphonic masters were Bernstein’s daily bread and among those I must single out Dmitri Shostakovich and Carl Nielsen. Bernstein’s stunning performance of the Nielsen Fifth - the dark-to-light odyssey with the renegade side drum - is now a gramophone classic and it hardly comes as a surprise that Bernstein would also rise to the challenge of the great Shostakovich “Leningrad” Symphony No 7 where the politics of conflict and national pride are addressed with such searing conviction.
Finally, a performance which could hardly personify Bernstein more vividly. His Israel Philharmonic account of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Francesca da Rimini’ isn’t perfect - the sheer range and intricacy of his emotive ‘rubatos’ make for a few untidinesses - but it is at least twice as exciting as any on recording.
- Edward Seckerson