SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

 

Concluding his penultimate season as the Seattle Symphony's music director, Gerard Schwarz chose Chichester Psalms and The Age of Anxiety as the orchestra's apt contribution to city-wide celebrations of Leonard Bernstein.

 

An article about leading figures in American theater once instanced "Orson Welles, to name only a few." Bernstein played a similarly many-sided role on the nation's musical scene. Besides the conductor steeped in the European symphonic tradition, there was the teacher who introduced millions to "classical" music through his Young People's Concerts and television programs. There was Bernstein the writer, Bernstein the phenomenal pianist, Bernstein the jazz aficionado, and Bernstein the sort of unofficial Jewish and liberal sage–the man once referred to in print as "house genius to Columbia Records." And there was the Bernstein who yearned to be thought of before all else as a composer.

 

Even within his own compositional output, several of these varied personae jostle for attention. Of all Bernstein's gifts, as anyone acquainted with West Side Story will probably agree, the most astonishing was perhaps his ability to set the lyric stage alight, and his symphonic works too are instinct with dramatic feeling.

 

With its biblical Hebrew text, Chichester Psalms harmoniously combines the obvious Jewish element with invigorating jazzy touches. Schwarz led the orchestra and Joseph Crnko's Seattle Symphony Chorale in a finely polished performance, to which 11-year-old Benjamin Richardson contributed a poised and perfectly pitched soprano solo.

 

The second of Bernstein's three symphonies, The Age of Anxiety, for piano and orchestra, has no explicit text, but it is based closely on the composer's reading of W.H. Auden's poem of the same title, and it is as much dramatic poem as symphony. This too was given a reading of comprehensive sympathy and enormous verve, adorned by Misha Dichter's fluent piano solo.

 

Between the two Bernstein works, along with Schwarz's cordial tribute to retiring orchestra members Rick Pressley and Scott Wilson, we heard a splendid performance of what is perhaps the best work by another celebrated American. Schwarz recently completed his five-CD set of William Schuman's symphonies on the Naxos label, and for the centerpiece of this program he chose No. 3.

 

Of all the possible claimants for the title of "the Great American Symphony," this is in my view the strongest. It is bracing–at times even brash–music in the authentic American manner, but in quieter moments its expressivity is genuinely personal. For Schuman, whose centenary falls this year, was that rare phenomenon: a man of high achievement in public life–he was president in turn of the Juilliard School and of Lincoln Center–and a public orator in his music, who yet had the integrity and the solidity of character not to lose touch with his own soul. And his symphony has an inner coherence that contrasted nicely with Bernstein's exuberant eclecticism.

 

Bernard Jacobson

 

NB: part of this review appeared also in the Seattle Times.